Yesterday I attended the talk of Thomas Henry Culhane, a Ph.D. Candidate at UCLA. He is working on a fascinating project called Solar Cities. The basic idea is to engage local poor population in Cairo, Egypt, to build fully functional solar hot water systems. There is not much on the web but here I could find an abstract of a paper published this year.

Solar C3ITIES pilot program has resulted in the creation of three effective and fully functioning solar hot water systems in Cairo built completely out of local materials – even recycled solid waste – using local labor and expertise. These three units now sit on top of two residences in Darb El Ahmar and the Zabaleen recycling school in Muqattam, Manshiyat Nasser.  Popularizing science through relevant, hands-on applications and integrating technology for industrial ecology systems, the “Cairo Communities” approach is a project undertaken by the mainly Coptic Manshiyat Nasser and the mainly Muslim Darb El Ahmar communities to bring together craftsmen and craftswomen, artisans, carpenters, welders, electricians and plumbers to build and introduce grassroots sustainable development infrastructure and technology through a new kind of vocational training program.

Here are some random notes I took during the talk:

– Before you teach you need to understand. Sybille, Culhane wife and colleague, was referring to the fact that most of the time we, people coming from industrialized countries, have the attitude of going to poor countries to teach something to them while, most of the time, it is the opposite case. In order to interact between such different cultures we need to live there and understand their culture.

– People want to feel part of history, they do not want to be left behind. Sybille was referring to the fact that people in Cairo are fully aware of what happens in other parts of the world. They have satellite television. They are fully aware that their living system sucks and they desire to have the same basic things that we have in other more developed parts of the world.

– You cannot buy a ‘heat collector’ in ‘The Sims’. Thomas was talking about the simulation game called ‘The Sims’, where you can fully furnish your apartment. However, the objects you can buy in the game are mostly useless in a country where the basic infrastructure is not there. The sets of objects and actions you can take in the game are modeled upon a rich country, read the States, and do not fit other cultures. Besides using these games could be possible to teach the basic principles behind renewable energies but these games are not meant for that.

– Kids in Egypt have skills and access to technology. Thomas was reporting examples of kids playing online games in Internet Cafés in Cairo city. Technology is there, just in different forms and solutions we are used to. Using these channels might be possible to spread new ideas in the community.

– The intelligence is in the network. This seems to be an advertisement message of a mobile phone operator. However, Thomas strongly believe that in order for projects like his to be self sustainable, there is a need for participatory design with the community. There is the need of involving the community in the loop. Once the competences are injected in the community then we might expect initial technological solutions to replicate and evolve spontaneously.

– Bottle Bricks. This was the most fascinating idea. Thomas mentioned the fact that to build the heat collector he was using PVC bottles that he had to sew and glue together. These bottles are thought with a single purpose in mind: carry a liquid. What if we think about a second use for each of our packaging. He was thinking about a Cola bottle that could be used to build a heat collector once the cola was drunk. Instead of sewing and gluing the bottle itself was ready to be connected to other bottles without any extra effort. This might not make a lot of sense in our culture but in developing countries it would make the difference between a pile of junk and technologically advanced materials to build collectors.

Wood, S., Cox, R., and Cheng, P. Attention design: Eight issues to consider. Computers in Human Behavior 22 (February 2006), 588–602. [pdf]

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This paper describes eight issues that are fundamental when designing attentive systems. First of all there is no consensus on what is attention. Many models are proposed that tend to represent it as a spotlight or as a ‘coherence field’, or a ‘dymanic telephoto system’. Most research tend to assimilate attention with visual search through eye-gaze. However this is not necessarily correct.

Second point attention is difficult to measure. Vision has a selective nature. The implication is that direction of gaze is not necessarily a synonym with focus of attention and therefore studies will need to validate focus of attention through further evidence.

The third point raised in the paper is to understand how graphical displays interact with attention. Larkin and Simon (1987) demonstrated that the way an extrernal representation encodes information is critical to how easy it will be for the user to find relevant information. This is connected to the split-attention effect. Shimojima (1999) claims that ‘free rides’ and ‘derivative meaning’ occurs when constraints on the relation between local and global structure in the representation and the target domain, are satisfied by the semantic conventions of the representation.

A fourth point of interest is what are the potential effects of introducing artificial feedback in systems designed to monitor the user’s attention. It has been demonstrated that the introduction of an an artificial feedback loop can, in some circumstances, cause variables that are ussually highly correlated to become decoupled.

A recent article [1] of the official journal of the Jesuits focused on the opportunities offered by virtual worlds for evangelization. Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro said that “The best way to understand (the Second Life phenomenon) is to enter into it, (and) live inside it to recognize its potential and dangers”.

Father Spadaro looked also at the risks to which users of this new medium might be exposed: users might experiment their virtual appearance with less inhibitions of their real appearance, “but on the other hand one can also get caught up in a spontaneity that knows no limits or discretion,” he said. Another big danger he pointed out is to become alienated from the real world and begin to identify oneself according to one’s self-created myth.

Another problem is that virtual world users play with a low level of responsibility. As many actions can be reverted or easily erased, users are exposed to a “low level of risk,” he said. While this might be good in some situations, it can yield negative psychological and spiritual consequences, like having fear of getting engaged in real-life actions, with an higher level of risks. “This has worrying emotional and affective consequences,” noted the article. In the virtual world everything is “under control and reversible,” making the real world look frightening.

Si va espandendo in internet il fenomeno della Second Life, cioè la possibilità di vivere in maniera simulata una sorta di ‘seconda vita’ digitale. L’articolo descrive il fenomeno, valutandone rischi e opportunità, e segnalando anche la presenza di elementi religiosi. Ogni iniziativa capace di animare positivamente questo ‘luogo’ è da considerare opportuna: la terra digitale è, a suo modo, anch’essa ‘terra di missione’. Occorre, comunque, essere attenti al bisogno ormai diffuso di un ‘altrove’, nel quale l’uomo pretende, in modo talvolta scorretto, di ritrovare se stesso.

[1] Antonio Spadaro S.I. “SECOND LIFE”: IL DESIDERIO DI UN’ALTRA VITA – La Civiltà Cattolica, 2007, III, pp. 266-278, quaderno 3771-3772.

More: [2] – [3] – [4] – [5]

Copyright notice: the present image was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

Colston, H. L., and Schiano, D. J. Looking and lingering as conversational cues in video-mediated communication. In CHI ’95: Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 1995), ACM Press, pp. 278–279. [url]

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The authors report an interesting finding: the amount of time spent looking at an unknown problem is inferred to suggest the level of difficulty involved solving the problem, and this inference is highly sensitive to timing parameters.

A study is described in which observers rated the difficulty people had in solving problems, based either upon simply how long the person looked at each problem, or also how long his or her gaze lingered on it after being instructed to move on. Initial results show a linear relationship between gaze duration and rated difficulty, with lingering as an added significant factor. These findings are discussed in terms of the role(s) gaze cues play in tracking understanding in conversations, with implications for the design of video-mediated communication (VMC) systems.

Velichkovsky, B. M. Communicating attention: Gaze position transfer in cooperative problem solving. Pragmatics and Cognition 3, 2 (1995), 199–222.

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Velichkovsky highlighted the importance of transferring gaze information at distance for collaborative work. Two participants were asked to solve a puzzle collaboratively. One of them had access to the solution while the other was operating the moves on the target puzzle. While the participants shared the same visual workspace, one of them had access to the solution but s/he could not rearrange the pieces. Velichkovsky manipulated the participants communication features. In the control condition the participants could only communicate via voice, while in a second condition the gaze of the participant who had access to the solution was projected on the workspace of the other, while in a final condition the one who had access to the solution could use a mouse pointer to show to the other the relevant parts. Both the experimental conditions, transfer of gaze position and pointing with the mouse, improved performance, however he did not register a significant differenb between mouse+voice and the gaze+voice conditon.

He also processed the data on verbal communication to verify changes in the conversation content. He found a significant reduction of the number of words in conditions of direct reference compared to the voice only condition. Spatial words were replaced by deictic demonstratives and definite referring expressions.

His experiment however did not show differences between the direction of the gaze position transfer (expert to novice vs. novice to expert). Also the experiment did not show differences in mouse vs. gaze reference. Gaze direction is intimately tied to the focus of attention, or better yet, to the focus of external forms of attention. This is only rarely the case for manual pointing.

The author argues that the duration of fixation alone is not a perfect correlate of its communicative role. The means that in order to elucidate the communicative aspect in eye-movements linguistic heuristic should be at work. He makes the example of long fixations which temporaly conicide with verbal remarks of the deictic type could trigger the attention of the partner.

Last Saturday we spent some time in Besançon, in France. It is a lovely city. Downtown is a pedestrian area with lots of shops and restaurants. Here are some pictures.

L’8 settembre sarà il giorno del Vaffanculo day, o V-Day. Una via di mezzo tra il D-Day dello sbarco in Normandia e V come Vendetta. Si terrà sabato otto settembre nelle piazze d’Italia, per ricordare che dal 1943 non è cambiato niente. Ieri il re in fuga e la Nazione allo sbando, oggi politici blindati nei palazzi immersi in problemi “culturali”. Il V-Day sarà un giorno di informazione e di partecipazione popolare.

Beppe Grillo

Clark, H. H. Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, USA, 2003, ch. Pointing and placing, pp. 243–268. [pdf]

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In this chapter Clark explains why pointing is so important to communication. He says that communication is ordinarily achored to the material world and that one way it gets anchored is through pointing. Clark also explains that it exists a counterpart of pointing: placing. Trrough the use of our position and the position of the objects we refer to in the actual worlds, we shape context to reduce misunderstanding and making communication more efficient. He argues that directing-to and placing-for are two communicative acts. Indicative acts, to be precise.

Indicating has fundamentally to do with creating indexes for things. Clark explains how every indication must establish an intrinsic connection between the signal and its object. The more transparent is this connection the more effective is the act.

Indicating an object in space must also lead the participants to focus attention on that object, or in other words, anything which focuses the attention is an index. Finally every indication must establish a particular interpretation of its object. That is why we cannot use an indication that stands on its own. Also this is connected to the fact that we often find pointing-to and placing-for devices combined.

Clark highlights also how gazing is a communication device for directing the addressees’ attention to objects. However eye gaze is special as people use the direction of their gaze to designate the person or things they are attending to. Also, eye gaze is not effective unless it is registered by the person being gazed at. So we talk often of mutual gaze.

Clark defines also what he calls a perceptually conspicuous site, or PCS, a site that is perceptually conspicuous relative to the speaker and interlocutour’s current common ground. Gesturing often points to PCSs but this indication should always be combined with an interpetating context, for instance an utterance explaing the relation of the gesture with the current activity. Finally, indicating tends to be a transitory signal, while placing a continuing one. 

Grant, E. R., and Spivey, M. J. Eye movements and problem solving: guiding attention guides thought. Psychological Science 14, 5 (September 2003), 462–466. [pdf]

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The main argument of this paper is that attention is not an outcome of cognition but it can help restructure cognition. The paper reports a study of participants solving a radiation problem. The movements of eyes was recorded over the associated image. The authors showed that participants who succesfully completed the task were more likely to look at the external part of the image. Then in a second experiment, the authors changed the graphical salience of this element, thus affecting the completition outcomes. They propose that eye movements patterns correlated with the problem solving process.

Overt visual attention during diagram-based problem solving, as measured by eye movements, has been used in numerous studies to reveal critical aspects of the problem-solving process that traditional measures like solution time and accuracy cannot address. In Experiment 1, we used this methodology to show that particular fixation patterns correlate with success in solving the tumor-and-lasers radiation problem. Given this correlation between attention to a particular diagram feature and problem-solving insight, we investigated participants’ cognitive sensitivity to perceptual changes in that diagram feature. In Experiment 2, we found that perceptually highlighting the critical diagram component, identified in Experiment 1, significantly increased the frequency of correct solutions. Taking a situated perspective on cognition, we suggest that environmentally controlled perceptual properties can guide attention and eye movements in ways that assist in developing problem-solving insights that dramatically improve reasoning.

Tags: controlled experiments, eye-tracking

Utrecht is a great city! It has the atmosphere of Amsterdam with some more charm. The canals are a bit wider with some sidewalks on each side. I loved the place.