Human-Computer Interaction Books

The media equation is a good enough predictor of user behavior, at least for telephone-based spoken dialog systems of the form my company builds, that it has informed our designs from top to bottom. Our applications apologize if they make a mistake. Callers respond well to this. Sure, the callers know they're talking to a machine, but this doesn't stop them from saying "thank you" when it's done or "please" before a query or feeling bad (or angry) if the computer can't understand them. Another strategy recommended by Nass and Reeves that we follow is trying to draw the caller in to work as a team with the computer; again, Nass and Reeves support this with several clever experiments. There is also a useful section on flattery, looking at the result of the computer flattering itself and its users; it turns out that we rate computers that flatter themselves more highly than ones that are neutral.

Among other interesting explanations you get in this book are why we're more tolerant of bad pictures than bad sound, why we focus on moving objects, speaking rate equilibrium, what we can do to make someone remember an event in a video, and the role of gender.

This book is very quick and easy to read. I read it in two days while on vacation it was so fascinating. In contrast to the classical yet dry social science format of hypothesis, experimental methodology, results, and essentially a summary of the results as a conclusion, Nass and Reeves only vaguely summarize their experimental methodology and take a no-holds-barred approach to drawing conclusions. This may annoy social scientists, most of whom expect their own kind to be far more circumspect.

This book is an absolute must-read for anyone designing mediated interfaces. For those who don't believe the results, I'd suggest running some experiments; our company did, and it made us believers.

In fact, this book is far from it. Well, as far from it as social science can get. In fact, is the most "scientific" of the user interface books I have read.

The main point I took away from the book is that people interact with objects, especially interactive and media devices, as if they were people. They demonstrate that when user interfaces are designed to be polite and interact in a positive social manner, the person has a much more enjoyable and profitable interaction.

Other books on the topic of user interface design are far less scientific, relying on generalizations and suppositions rather than constructing a study. Some use data from a usability evaluation, but these are often far from scientific.

The authors construct hypotheses, usually based on the results of studies of interaction between humans, and see if the results of the results hold true for human-machine interaction.

Usually, it does.

I highly recommend this book.

I do not disagree with their findings, but I really disagree with their conclusions, especially the eagerness and determination with which they jump to them. However I notice their ideas seem pretty convincing, and here lies my real worry with this book. So if you decide to read it anyway keep asking yourself if the conclusions Reeves and Nass jump to are really as worthwhile as they make them appear.

Unlike technical books that bury the reader in details from the outset, this book provides context first, starting with a brief overview of IPv6 and how it improves on IPv4 - the current widely-deployed global network protocol. This holistic approach to explaining IPv6 provides much more than reference material or detailed configuration-level information (although that level of detailed information is in the book too).

Pete's latest book will help you really *understand* IPv6, from "what triggered the development of the new protocol", to "IPv6 basics", to "how to configure IPv6 network devices and host computers". Each major topic is covered - addressing, security, multicasting, QoS, neighbor discovery, autoconfiguration, mobility, transition, services, deployment planning, and futures (full disclosure: I contributed to this book).

Considering the enormous success of the Internet and the pervasive native of IP-networking, and considering that IPv6 will be here soon and likely be *the* network protocol for the next 20 years, every IT professional should know something about it. This book is the way to get that knowledge.

The book starts off in the first few chapters with a "history" of IPv4 and the reasons why it needs to be updated, along with a brief "intro" to it. One thing I hadn't known about previously was the "Internet model" of internetworking, which as four levels instead of the standard seven with the OSI model. Also covered are reasons why IPv4 no longer "works" and then the origins of IPv6.

One thing too about Ipv6 that because it is a streamlined version of IPv4, that items like headers and such are streamlined as well, some items necessary in IPv4 are not needed with IPv6. Other issues covered? Addressing, Routing, Security, related protocols, and transition strategies.

IPv6 is already being implemented around the world and this book, albeit a bit dated at this point offers an excellent description of the "next generation" version of IP.

The redeeming feature is actually the non-technical content, such as the introductory materials that explain why IPv6 is where it still is today, and how it can move forward, or the project/migration management aspects of network administration that non-seasoned network hands will find accessible and useful.

Bottom line: those vaguely familiar with IPv6 already will notice a number of mistakes, but then they really don't need this book. Those not familiar with IP networking are bound to be confused, especially if they're trying to experiment along the way. Hopefully a second printing, after a thorough technical editorial review, will enable this book to be more than it is today.

Even though this may seem like fairytales to some, Dertouzos has built this vision of the future using solid basis on the technology that either we have in prototypes today or likely to be attainable in the near future. His work at MIT has already shown that as computing resources become more plentiful, Human-Centric computing will become a possibility.

My overall impression of the book is that it has some novel ideas and very persuasive author that is working hard to get you to like them. The book seem a little repetitive at times but over all it as a very interesting read.

In some ways this is the gold-collared knowledge worker counterpart book to Ted Halstead and Michael Lind's The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (citizen-centered). Those who liked The Cultural Creatives or IMAGINE: What America Could be in the 21st Century, can adopt this book as their user's guide for demanding change in information technology.

I recommend it because it is full of common sense, is the first really helpful "requirements document" for a clean sheet new approach to software and hardware and ergonomics ($3000 word for user friendly). The bad news is that nobody is listening. We are ten years away from this being a reality because the legacy providers (big hardware, one certain software company) are not about to retool their empires for the sake of delivering better value.

It is more than a little amusing to me to have this book endorsed by the CEO of the one company that prides itself on producing software with mutated migrated Application Program Interfaces that are used to extort tribute from third party software developers, where no sane consumer will invest in his products until they've had three years to "mature" in the marketplace.

The opening listings of the "standard faults" in today's "consumer electronics" is alone worth the price of the book--unintegrated systems fault; manual labor fault; human servitude fault; crash fault; excessive learning fault; feature overload fault; fake intelligence fault; waiting fault; ratchet fault...

The book ends on a low note and high note. The low note is a description of Oxygen, a $50M project seeded by DARPA and including several major company partners such as HP and Nokia. This project has some excellent ideas, including a new focus on an architecture for nomadic computing with three aspects: a Handy 21 (hand-held), Enviro 21 (intermediate personal computers at home, office, and in car), and N21 Network (Intentional Naming System, every computer and peripheral everywhere is in the public domain and broadcasting its location and status, use on the fly). Good stuff. What he doesn't mention is that the U.S. Government is spending over half a billion dollars on completely uncoordinated desktop analysis toolkits, and there is probably 2-3X that much being spent in the private sector. He does note that we will never get our act together if we continue to develop hardware and software in a very fragmented and hardware-based manner.

On the high note, the author has clearly thought about the consequences of having an information revolution here in the USA, creating information royalty, while leaving the rest of the world dispossessed, in poverty, and unconnected. He has a very practical appreciation for the fact that the USA must fund two distinct foreign assistance programs--a Digital Marshall Plan (my phrase) to jack in the entire world; and a commensurate literacy, birth control, disease control, and famine control program to stabilize populations to the point where they can be productive within the global grid.

I read this book on the airplane coming back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (Federal Emerging Technologies Conference sub-set), and I was really struck by the contradiction between the vast fragmentation spread out over Las Vegas (the man who has everything also has to carry it) and the elegant simplicity of this book's vision--one hand-held able to be any of 100+ devices. "It's the software, simpleton...."

What saddens me, especially when considering the billions of dollars being given away by our richest software developer, someone who seems to favor gestures on the margin instead of quality control and open source at the core, is that we knew all this in the mid-1980's. The eighteen distinct functionalities needed for a desktop analysts' workstation were identified by CIA in 1986--everything from data ingestion and conversion softwares to modeling and simulation and pattern detection and of course desktop publishing. The year after the CIA prototypes were working so successfully on UNIX (Sun), CIA decided that the PS2 would be the standard "dumb" terminal, and all UNIX efforts were ordered to shut-down. The big organizations, the ones with the power to make the revolution, chose control and dumb terminals over freedom and smart software. I am very skeptical that the vision in this book will come to fruition...

For example: On page 116, one of the factors mentioned as a limit to OSETI (finding laser beacons and such) is extinction--the attenuation of light due to dust in the intersteller medium. This, it is said, limits our ability to see laser beacons to "a few dozens light years" for visible wavelengths. Really?? Then how come you can go and see stars farther away than that with your naked eye? Oh, because they're brighter! Well, how bright does a laser beacon need to be? How much attentuation is there, in per cent, dB or whatever, at, say, 100 light years? How much does a beam spread out over, say, 100 light years? How much variation in the signal is there over time as a result of dust? Not a BIT of quantitative data on this stuff!

Like all other SETI enthusiasts I've seen, they also ignore another issue: As communication techniques get more advanced, they look more and more like random noise. Our millions of chattering cell phones and internet hosts will almost certainly be undetectable to anyone outside the earth environment, let alone the solar system: Those transmissions have no directionality, they are low power precisely because they are efficient and advanced, and their advanced modulation causes them to look like white noise. Consider a 300 bps modem, with its old-fashioned tone signaling; then listen to a 56k modem, which, except when it's hooking up, sounds almost like rushing steam. It's hard to escape the idea that we will only pick up radio from ET if he intentionally beams it at us, a doubtful proposition unless he's within 60 light years, as he has no way to know of OUR radio transmissions.

A final word about copy editing: I've yet to read a book with absolutely no errors, but at least they could get three-letter words like "its" right. There are other serious errors, such as missing words, the ubiquitous "different than," and other less glaring mistakes. If they can't do better than that, perhaps they should just record audio tapes.

All in all, about a third of the way through, I decided that other books must surely be able to better satisfy my curiosity on this subject.

I like the idea of this book, but the execution left a bit to be desired.

The first two sections ("Are We Alone?" and "Getting a Dial Tone") do a passably good job of introducing some of the basics of interstellar communication, ably introducing both the fundamentals of radio and optical technologies and the unique challenges of communicating a signal (any signal; the details of the signal to be sent are reserved for Part III) across interstellar distances.

Problems with the first two sections are:

(1) inconsistent readability: the author seems not to have found a consistent tone for the book, and wanders between wide-eyed pie-in-the-sky speculation and bone-dry technical detail;

(2) organizational flaws: the author routinely discusses a concept or entity throughout early chapters without a decent introduction or explanation, only to treat the subject in question at length (with the proper explanatory introduction) later in the text -- the discussion of the SETI@home distributed computing project is particularly guilty of this;

(3) lack of investigative reporting: almost every piece of information in these sections could have come out of a textbook or a web search, and it's clear that the author hasn't bothered to interview the movers and shakers in the SETI community and find out anything much about the "story behind the story," which might have made for some interesting reading;

(4) bad editing: there is a typo every few pages, which is a minor beef but in the age of spell-checkers hardly excusable.

Nonetheless, if you've never read a "Scientific American" article about SETI, the first two sections of the book would be educational. If you have any exposure to SETI prior to picking up the book, chances are that you won't learn very much (except possibly about optical SETI/CETI, which relies on the production and/or detection of laser light aimed at a specific star system, and which is grossly undertreated in the literature).

The third section ("Communicating with Other Worlds") treats the specifics of the author's ideas about what sort of message could be sent by us (or, by extension, might be received by us from others). The author makes an analogy between modular messages encoded in binary code and genes encoded by DNA, and sets up one potential system that might be used to send a complex message from star A to star B. This section is definitely the weakest in the book, for the following reasons.

(1) It treats at punishingly great length only one possible system of a presumably great many for communicating with alien intelligences, glossing over other approaches in favor of a detailed treatment of the author's pet approach. While I don't have a specific complaint with the approach described, I will say that as a working biologist, I found the author's biologically motivated analogies ("igenes," "binary DNA") strained and in some cases laughable. It probably makes the material "sexier" in the computer-science and SETI literature, but as a life scientist I mostly winced a lot.

(2) In part because of this, the author doesn't put his approach in any kind of context -- e.g., how else might we do it?

(3) It's way too long and inappropriately detailed: a great deal of theory of computation stuff that's not at all unique to SETI or the challenge of communicating with a non-human intelligence ends up in this section, and I don't think that benefits the reader more than just saying, "We'll send computer programs using the benefit of knowledge reaped from the maturing fields of cryptography and computer science and our impressive knowledge of the physical universe," and focusing more on reasons why any approach like this has shortcomings and might not work regardless of how clever you are.

All that having been said, this is an OK book. I wouldn't recommend that it be the only thing that you read about SETI, nor would I recommend that you read it cover-to-cover (unless you have troubles with insomnia), but if you're an avid reader of the SETI literature, it certainly can't hurt to pick this one up.

DOT COM CIOs should have purchased this book before hiring anyone!!!

I feel the book could be useful for people who are approaching websites from a technical background but that the overkill - in my opinion - on the marketing basics will obstruct people with a marketing background from getting much value from it.

I also found the structure of the book took greatly from my ability to get to the content. In many chapters, things are broken down like chunks of code - while this might make it easy to reference a certain topic, the way the code was assembled made reading the book in a linear manner difficult. Had it been a website, it would have lost this customer to another site quickly (that said, the structure would probably work better online).

Nonetheless, there are ideas of value in the book and, for readers from a technical background, it offers some ideas that you should think about.

For an example, Pesce devotes _multiple_ chapters to discussing the Furby. He, himself, acknowledges the blisteringly fast pace of technology, so it is not suprising that his detailed account of the creation and marketing of this toy is tragically trite and (to use the word as unsnobbishly as possible) passe.

After enduring these first chapters I hoped the book might address more general aspects of technology, but instead it becomes a personal travelogue of Pesce's (not the least bit compelling) contributions to cyberspace. If he relayed these events with the perceptive knack of modern historians, his anecdotes might prove worthwhile, but instead they read like a desperate attempt of his "trying to find a place for himself" in the story of the development of modern technology.

This book brought me very few new perspectives and even fewer new facts. I strongly discourage anyone from investing time or money into this book if you're approaching it with the objectives I did.

He takes off from where Seymour Papert's Mindstorms left us with technologies that create toys that help us to develop our mental models of the world. Toys that make us think.

As a generation of children grow up playing with Lego Mindstorms, Furbys, AIBO's etc.. they will develop their mental faculties that will come into play as they define the future.

I grew up with a BBC micro and started programming adventure games in BASIC, which opened up a whole new world to me. As a generation we played computer games while growing up. These were rich interactive environments that left us feeling unchallenged in a schooling system, which was still geared towards to old teaching techniques. These techniques seemed totally inadequate in coping with children who could solve complex mathematical problems at home whilst programming. So I am not sure how the schools of today handle children who are building robots and playing with toys that they can not only interact with, but ones which can learn and change as they are interacted with.

Do we need to change the way we approach education? Instead of complaining that children have MTV (Short) attention spans, we should be creating an education system that can cope with the speed at which these young minds are working at. I think we should be encouraging children to be thinking faster and day dreaming and using their imaginations, instead of trying to get them to fit an out dated model that will leave them totally unprepared for an ever more complex world.

I digress, but these are thoughts that come to mind while reading this book, as you whisked off on this tour of future mind toys.

If you can't tell, I love this book! Anyone interested in toys that can help them or their children think, should read this book.

The book tackles many different user interface projects in a consistent manner, starting with a problem definition, followed by designs of the UI and database, and concluding with an analysis of the application. The main complaint I had with the book is that it really discusses only one approach to building user interfaces to MySQL, completely ignoring the web interface, which could be built with PHP, JSPs, or even applets. Thus the title is somewhat misleading. Finally, the reader does need a fairly hefty background before starting this book.

Yes, I've read the book (long ago). It helped me to learn MySQL. It even made me an advocate of MySQL. But I didn't know the first thing about what makes a database work. I was following the masses of new web developers, ignorantly flocking to MySQL.

If you need fantastic speed, rock-solid reliability and -- more importantly -- a true understanding of how real RDBMS systems work, learn and use PostreSQL. It runs circles around MySQL! (We use it to support web services in 20 countries).

PostgreSQL will look far better on your resume than will MySQL. When I see PostgreSQL listed on a candidate's resume, I know (if the candidate is truly postgres-savvy) s/he can be counted on to work with virtually any database we support.

An extremely impressive group of writers participates. Including: Howard Rheingold, Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Timothy Leary and Gitta Salomon. It's definitely worth a read, but don't be afraid (unless you're a Macintosh history buff) to skip large sections.