"The man who faked nearly killing people with electricity" wouldn't have sold as well.

The man who shocked the world, by Thomas Bass was really interesting.
In all fairness I like a lot of biographical non-fiction,
(If you ever get the chance, check out The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai by John Tayman, http://www.amazon.com/Colony-Harrowing-Story-Exiles-Molokai/dp/0743233018/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238167682&sr=8-1). It's really interesting.

Anyway, I liked hearing about this guy's life. His most famous experiment about obedience is important as it is contraversial. People are much more likely to obey authority, even under relatively minor pressure, and this is something that disturbs most people.

More interesting to me though was his work on urban psychology and sociology. Such as his lost letter techniques, and how likely people are to help one another. I suspect that people may be even less helpful now-a-days, especially just passing by. Electronic devices and cell phones allow people to isolate themselves into there own enviroment, despite physically being in public areas.

The lost letter technique as a predictor of public opinion is also an interesting idea, but it is limited to polarizing issues that affect the population at large.

Overall, pretty cool book.

The Design of Future Things

This was a pretty good, book, I enjoyed it much more than his previous book, "The design of everyday things". It was a much more modern look at what could happen and how we will interact with it.

It seems that this book is predominately about automation, talking about how your house, your car, and seemingly everything will one day be automated, and it asks if this is a good thing. I wouldn't mind my car being able to act like a taxi, but I would also still like to be able to drive it myself. I wouldn't mind my house automating a few things, but trying to anticipate my every move, need, and whim, that's pretty complicated, not to mention creepy.

Visions of HAL, Shai'dan, and other science fiction digital villans warn of giving computers to much power, even at the end of his book, Norman gives a vision of talking machines, at which point you start questioning the author's sanity.

A few things I did like about the book were how much control could be given to the machines, such as in the "tight reigns, loose reigns" situations. I don't think I would mind have the equivalent of "electronic livestock", but trying to replace humans outright seems to be a bit troubling.

All Hail the Robot Overlords.

Navigating inside and outside of the box

Article Link: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1360000/1357330/p1769-elmqvist.pdf?key1=1357330&key2=2033297321&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=28074669&CFTOKEN=14175303

    Evaluating Motion Constraints for 3D Wayfinding in Immersive and Desktop Virtual Environments by Niklas Elmqvist (INRIA), M. Eduard Tudoreanu (University of Arkansas), and Philippas Tsigas (Chalmers Univ. of Tech.), did a study in which they tried using different camera systems for navigating a virtual world in both an immersive enviroment, and a desktop enviroment. They used a system called a CAVE, (Cave Automatic Virtual Enviroment) for the immersive enviroment, (a picture of a "cave" is above").

There are two main tasks in navigation, orientation and wayfinding. Orientation is finding out where you are, and wayfinding is figuring out how you are going to get to the next spot.  People accomplish this task by building cognitive maps of an area, using spatial distances and landmarks.

What follows is three techniques to make a better cognitive map.

1.   Global Coverage, the user should be exposed to all of the world they will be navigating in.

2.  Continious Motion, the users can move smoothly from place to place, and don't have to

     constantly reorient themselves.

3. Local Control: No matter how much you try to guide the user, you should ultimately let

    them control there movement as they please.

User explored a variety of different areas, consisting of indoor and outdoor enviroments,  as well as more abstract navigations (such as infoscapes).

They used three different methods for navigation, one was essentially like a tour guide, allowing users to change camera orientation. Another gave complete free reign to navigating through the enviroment. The other was kind of a hybrid between the others, the user was essentially on a leash that allowed them to wander around the area around the tour, but had to remain closeby.

At the beginning of the test the users traversed through the different enviroments. After they had accomplished this, they were given an overhead map and told to try and accurately place landmarks on an overhead map of the enviroment. In the final stage, the participants were to go back into the enviroment and to try and find objects within it.

As it turns out, while spring navigation seems to work the best for desktops, free motion worked the best for fully immersive enviroments. Guidance in CAVE's actually hurt performance.

I found this to be pretty interesting, that people are better off exploring in immersive enviroments than just being guided.

In the future they plan on studying people with long term experience with mental worlds who could form quite sophisticated mental maps of areas, such as video gamers who have played a particular game map a lot.

I thought that it was an interesting article. I myself have noticed in multiplayer computer games that some guidance through a new map is extremely helpful to being effective in the game. I would like to see further work on how training could happen using a virtual medium to provide a mental map for real world areas.