"The workers swore that this arrangement made them feel calmer. But did more screen area actually help with cognition? To find out, Czerwinski's team conducted another experiment. The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration - like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV.
The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind. So her group began devising tools that maximized screen space by grouping documents and programs together - making it possible to easily spy them out of the corner of your eye, ensuring that you would never forget them in the fog of your interruptions. Another experiment created a tiny round window that floats on one side of the screen; moving dots represent information you need to monitor, like the size of your in-box or an approaching meeting. It looks precisely like the radar screen in a military cockpit.
As anyone who has been in the U.S. Navy can attest to, practically speaking, sailors are already using anything they can get away with to maintain alertness. For some reason the Navy way is to have lots and lots of redundancy to account for fatigue induced errors, rather than reducing fatigue. As a result sailors can be required to stand 8 hours of watch, in which their job is completely redundant, on top of a 10 hour physically exhausting work day, every day for months on end. I personally found myself hallucinating that I was eating a hamburger in a crowd while standing watch one particular night. As a result most sailors drink coffee non-stop, have a stash of No-Doze packed away somewhere, are chain smokers, or use smokeless tobacco in order to stay awake. If there weren't nearly constant drug tests, I'm sure they'd use harder stuff.
Curiously the one exception to this seems to be pilots, who are required to get 8 hours of sleep in the 24-hours before they fly. I guess in the situation were redundancy isn't really possible, the Navy will concede that humans do need to sleep occasionally.
If it weren't for the fact that whatever DARPA comes up with never get away with being used unless it's wartime, I'd have more of a problem with it.
Having lived in Japan and enjoyed the high-tech toilets in my own home, we found that the only thing that we wanted in our home was the "high-tech" toilet paper dispenser. This wonderful gadget allows the easiest change of toilet paper in history. Just lift the new roll into place. We special ordered one for our new home!
See it here: http://www.totousa.com/toto/admin/upload/pd fspc/yh 51t2.pdf
The pictures don't really do them justice, but the idea is simple. Two dowels extend into the center of the roll from each side of the dispenser. They are hinged so that they both lift up, but they don't go past horizontal, and they are on a spring so they want to snap down to the horizontal position. To change a roll, you lift the new toilet paper up from underneath, the dowels hinge up and release the old roll and then snap into the new roll. Then you lower the new roll and the dowels stop at horizontal again. Beautiful. We argue over who gets to change the roll.
Slashdot Mirror
"The workers swore that this arrangement made them feel calmer. But did more screen area actually help with cognition? To find out, Czerwinski's team conducted another experiment. The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration - like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV.
The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind. So her group began devising tools that maximized screen space by grouping documents and programs together - making it possible to easily spy them out of the corner of your eye, ensuring that you would never forget them in the fog of your interruptions. Another experiment created a tiny round window that floats on one side of the screen; moving dots represent information you need to monitor, like the size of your in-box or an approaching meeting. It looks precisely like the radar screen in a military cockpit.
"As anyone who has been in the U.S. Navy can attest to, practically speaking, sailors are already using anything they can get away with to maintain alertness. For some reason the Navy way is to have lots and lots of redundancy to account for fatigue induced errors, rather than reducing fatigue. As a result sailors can be required to stand 8 hours of watch, in which their job is completely redundant, on top of a 10 hour physically exhausting work day, every day for months on end. I personally found myself hallucinating that I was eating a hamburger in a crowd while standing watch one particular night. As a result most sailors drink coffee non-stop, have a stash of No-Doze packed away somewhere, are chain smokers, or use smokeless tobacco in order to stay awake. If there weren't nearly constant drug tests, I'm sure they'd use harder stuff.
Curiously the one exception to this seems to be pilots, who are required to get 8 hours of sleep in the 24-hours before they fly. I guess in the situation were redundancy isn't really possible, the Navy will concede that humans do need to sleep occasionally.
If it weren't for the fact that whatever DARPA comes up with never get away with being used unless it's wartime, I'd have more of a problem with it.
Having lived in Japan and enjoyed the high-tech toilets in my own home, we found that the only thing that we wanted in our home was the "high-tech" toilet paper dispenser. This wonderful gadget allows the easiest change of toilet paper in history. Just lift the new roll into place. We special ordered one for our new home!
d fspc/yh 51t2.pdf
See it here:
http://www.totousa.com/toto/admin/upload/p
The pictures don't really do them justice, but the idea is simple. Two dowels extend into the center of the roll from each side of the dispenser. They are hinged so that they both lift up, but they don't go past horizontal, and they are on a spring so they want to snap down to the horizontal position. To change a roll, you lift the new toilet paper up from underneath, the dowels hinge up and release the old roll and then snap into the new roll. Then you lower the new roll and the dowels stop at horizontal again. Beautiful. We argue over who gets to change the roll.