Phantom vibrations among undergraduates: Prevalence and associated psychological characteristics

‘Phantom vibration syndrome,’ or perceived vibrations from a device that is not really vibrating, is a recent psychological phenomenon that has attracted the attention of the media and medical community. Most (89%) of the 290 undergraduates in our sample had experienced phantom vibrations, and they experienced them about once every two weeks, on average. However, few found them bothersome. Those higher in conscientiousness experienced phantom vibrations less frequently, and those who had strong reactions to text messages (higher in the emotional reaction subscale of text message dependence) were more bothered by phantom vibrations. These findings suggest that targeting individuals’ emotional reactions to text messages might be helpful in combating the negative consequences of both text message dependency and phantom vibrations. However, because few young adults were bothered by these phantom vibrations or made attempts to stop them, interventions aimed at this population may be unnecessary.     

Content information desired by Chinese users for effective use of information appliances

Many studies have been conducted to determine how to present information on mobile phones in such a way as to enhance usability, but those studies have not considered what information users need for effective decision making. To investigate what users want from mobile phones, we carried out a content preparation study. A questionnaire was constructed based on prior results from website content research, traditional usability studies on consumer electronics, and extensive study on various types of mobile phones; it was completed by 375 Chinese industrial participants. The statistical results revealed nine major factors of mobile phone content: information relating to input/search, functions, operation, multimedia functions, stored files, phone calls, help/service, accessory functions, and messages. Also, users of different ages and genders evidenced different requirements for mobile phone content, especially concerning accessory and multimedia functions. This study suggests guidelines for mobile phone designers targeted at the Chinese market and provides a base for content study of other information appliances.     

Helpful-stressful cycle? Psychological links between type of mobile phone user and stress

The profusion of smartphones allows more people to have access to a telephone, a computer and the Internet, all via one device. Despite this convenience, excessive usage and habitual checking can cause significant stress for smartphone users. A helpful-stressful cycle is beginning to emerge as a pattern. With this in mind, we develop a model that examines the differences between smartphone and traditional mobile phone users with regard to the relationships between four psychological factors: locus of control (LOC), social interaction anxiety (SIA), need for touch (NFT) and materialism. Our examination explores this in the context of the level of stress these two types of users experience when using their chosen phone. The results from our empirical study suggest that user type moderates the aforementioned relationships. The effects of LOC, SIA and NFT on ‘technostress’ are stronger for smartphone users than for traditional mobile phone users. In contrast, materialism is positively related to stress for traditional mobile phone users but not for smartphone users.     

Human–battery interaction on mobile phones

Mobile phone users have to deal with limited battery lifetime through a reciprocal process we call human–battery interaction. We conducted three user studies in order to understand human–battery interaction and discover the problems in existing designs that prevent users from effectively dealing with the limited battery lifetime. The studies include a large-scale international survey, two long-term field trials including quantitative battery logging and qualitative inquiries, and structured interviews with twenty additional mobile phone users. We evaluated various aspects of human–battery interaction, including charging behavior, battery indicators, user interfaces for power-saving settings, user knowledge, and user reaction. We find that mobile phone users can be categorized into two types regarding human–battery interaction and often have inadequate knowledge regarding phone power characteristics. We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence that problems in state-of-the-art user interfaces have led to under-utilized power-saving settings, under-utilized battery energy, and dissatisfied users. Our findings provide insights into improving mobile phone design for users to effectively deal with the limited battery lifetime. Our work is the first to systematically address human–battery interaction on mobile phones and is complementary to the extensive research on energy-efficient design for a longer battery lifetime.     

Kei-Tying teens: Using mobile phone e-mail to bond, bridge, and break with social ties—a study of Japanese adolescents

This paper examines the extent to which Japanese adolescents use mobile phone e-mail to bond, bridge, and break with their social ties. Although existing literature shows that adolescents use mobile phone e-mail to bond with intimate strong ties, the fluid nature of social networks during adolescence suggests that mobile phone e-mail may also be used to bridge to new ties and to break with old ties. Drawing on a stratified random sample survey of 501 high school students living in Tokyo, we find that mobile phone e-mail is used both to bond and bridge, but not to break with ties. We also find that the intensity with which Japanese adolescents use mobile phone e-mail is more fundamentally a result of bridging than bonding. These findings apply both to typical users and heavy users.     

Personal security

I am sitting on a plane, listening to two executives outline their strategy for a major buyout of a bridge/router vendor. Since I am a geek and understand what they are talking about, it's an interesting set of tactics that they are considering to get the price of the company down to something they want. What's even more interesting is how open they are with what they are talking about and, even more, I know the president of the company which they are planning to acquire. It would be very easy for me to make a phone call when we land and completely trash all their plans.     

MViewer: mobile phone spatiotemporal data viewer

Nowadays movement patterns and people’s behavioral models are needed for traffic engineers and city planners. These observations could be used to reason about mobility and its sustainability and to support decision makers with reliable information. The very same knowledge about human diaspora and behavior extracted from these data is also valuable to the urban planner, so as to localize new services, organize logistics systems and to detect changes as they occur in the movement behavior. Moreover, it is interesting to investigate movement in places like a shopping area or a working district either for commercial purposes or for improving the service quality. These kinds of tracking data are made available by wireless and mobile communication technologies. It is now possible to record and collect a large amount of mobile phone calls in a city. Technologies for object tracking have recently become affordable and reliable and hence we were able to collect mobile phone data from a city in China from January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2008. The large amount of phone call records from mobile operators can be considered as life mates and sensors of persons to inform howmany people are present in any given area and how many are entering or leaving. Each phone call record usually contains the caller and callee IDs, date and time, and the base station where the phone calls are made. As mobile phones are widely used in our daily life, many human behaviors can be revealed by analyzing mobile phone data. Through mobile phones, we can learn the information about locations, communications between mobile phone users during their daily lives. In this work, we propose a comprehensive visual analysis system named as MViewer, Mobile phone spatiotemporal data Viewer, which is the first system to visualize and analyze the population’smobility patterns from millions of phone call records. Our system consists of three major components: 1) visual analysis of user groups in a base station; 2) visual analysis of the mobility patterns on different user groups making phone calls in certain base stations; 3) visual analysis of handoff phone call records. Some well-established visualization techniques such as parallel coordinates and pixelbased representations have been integrated into our system. We also develop a novel visualization schemes, Voronoidiagram-based visual encoding to reveal the unique features of mobile phone data. We have applied our system to real mobile phone datasets that are kindly provided by our project partners and obtained some interesting findings regarding people’s mobility patterns.     

Analyzing and mining a code search engine usage log

This paper presents an analysis of a year long usage log of Koders, the first commercially available Internet-Scale code search engine (http://www.koders.com). The usage log comprises about ten million activities from more than three million users. Analysis of the usage data shows that despite of attracting a large number of visitors, Koders has a very sparse usage and that it lacks regular usage from many of its users. When compared to Web search, search behavior in Koders showed many similar patterns. A topic modeling analysis of the usage data shows what topics users of Koders are looking for. Observations on the prevalence of these topics among the users, and observations on how search and download activities vary across topics, lead to the conclusion that users who find code search engines usable are those who already know to a high level of specificity what to look for. This paper also presents a general categorization of these topics that provides insights on the different ways code search engine users express their queries. It identifies various forms of queries in Koders’s log and the kinds of results addressed by the queries. It also provides several suggestions for improvements in code search engines based on the analysis of usage, topics, and query forms. The work presented in this paper is the first of its kind that reveals several insights on the usage of an Internet-Scale code search engine.     

从“中国制造”到“中国创造”——浅析本土化设计对中国传统文化的传承

中国工业设计起点低、发展时间短,在实践中别无选择的承启了现代主义设计落后约30年的历史,在市场化与国际化的冲击下,因循国外设计成为了一种普遍现象,造成了市场上"山寨"产品迅速增多的现状。面对这样的情况,我们的设计该如何发展?如何将我们擅长的"中国制造"发展成为现今倡导的"中国创造"?本文以我国产品市场的现状入手,从我国传统文化与现代设计的关系角度进行分析,以试图寻找这些问题的答案。     

Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration

Vibration offers many potential benefits for the use of mobile phones. In this paper, we propose a new method of rendering live football game on mobile phones using vibration. A mobile phone is “synchronized” with the ball in the real field. By holding the phone, users are able to experience dynamic movements of the ball, to know attacking directions and which team is leading the attack. The usability test of our system shows that vibrotactile display is suitable for rendering live football information on mobile phones by adopting designed coding schemes with a right training process.      

Are we addicted to our cell phones?

Cellular telephone use has become extremely widespread over the past several years. There has been concern that current high levels of cell phone use may be compared to a behavioral addiction. However, this has yet to be thoroughly tested. This area of research also lacks in determining what the causes and consequences of consistent cell phone use may be. The present study examined the prevalence of characteristics of a cell phone addiction among a university student population along with possible predictors of high frequency use. Participants were a total of 152 undergraduate students (n = 35 males and n = 117 females). It was hypothesized that anxiety, as measured using self-report questionnaires, would increase upon having access to one's cell phone limited for high frequency users. However, anxiety only increased when participants had their cell phone sitting in front of them and were instructed not to use them. Predictors and variables hypothesized to be related included social anxiety, social connectedness, and addiction-proneness. Results indicated that social anxiety and addiction-proneness are significant predictors of frequent cell phone use, but social connectedness has no significant connection. This study provided insights into why cell phones are sometimes used so compulsively, and if frequency of cell phone use is becoming so high that it is becoming a new behavioral addiction.     

The impact of personal innovativeness on product aesthetics and self-connection with brand: a case study of mobile phone users

The concept of personal innovativeness in information technology (PIIT) is often used in an IS context to understand the adoption of IT products and services. However, to the best of our knowledge, few studies have investigated the influence of PIIT on visual product aesthetics (AES) and the consumer's self-connection with brand. By comparing smartphone and functional phone users, this study revealed that PIIT is a significant predictor in explaining centrality of visual product aesthetics (CVPA) and self-brand connection (SBC). PIIT also acts as a predictor of AES and moderates the relationship between satisfaction (SAT) and SBC for smartphone users but not for functional phone users. For both user groups, CVPA predicts AES, and AES contributes to SAT and SBC. The academic and managerial implications of these results were discussed.     

A chronological review of empirical research on personal information privacy concerns: An analysis of contexts and research constructs

As concerns about personal information privacy (PIP) continue to grow, an increasing number of studies have empirically investigated the phenomenon. However, researchers are not well informed about the shift of PIP research trends with time. In particular, there is a lack of understanding of what constructs have been studied in what contexts. As a result, researchers may design their study without sufficient guidance. This problem can lead to unproductive efforts in advancing PIP research. Therefore, it is important and timely to review prior PIP research to enhance our understanding of how it has evolved. We are particularly interested in understanding the chronological changes in contexts and research constructs studied. We use a chronological stage model of PIP research we develop, a set of contextual variables identified from prior literature, and the four-party PIP model suggested by Conger et al. (2013) as theoretical foundations to conduct a chronological literature review of empirical PIP concern studies. We find several PIP research trends during the last two decades, such as the quantity of PIP research has drastically increased; the variety of contexts and research constructs being studied has increased substantially; and many constructs have been studied only once while only a few have been repeatedly studied. We also find that the focus of PIP research has shifted from general/unspecified contexts to specific ones. We discuss the contributions of the study and recommendations for future research directions. We propose a fifth party as an emergent player in the ecosystem of PIP and call for future research that investigates it.     

A people-to-people matching system using graph mining techniques

A people-to-people matching system (or a match-making system) refers to a system in which users join with the objective of meeting other users with the common need. Some real-world examples of these systems are employer-employee (in job search networks), mentor-student (in university social networks), consume-to-consumer (in marketplaces) and male-female (in an online dating network). The network underlying in these systems consists of two groups of users, and the relationships between users need to be captured for developing an efficient match-making system. Most of the existing studies utilize information either about each of the users in isolation or their interaction separately, and develop recommender systems using the one form of information only. It is imperative to understand the linkages among the users in the network and use them in developing a match-making system. This study utilizes several social network analysis methods such as graph theory, small world phenomenon, centrality analysis, density analysis to gain insight into the entities and their relationships present in this network. This paper also proposes a new type of graph called “attributed bipartite graph”. By using these analyses and the proposed type of graph, an efficient hybrid recommender system is developed which generates recommendation for new users as well as shows improvement in accuracy over the baseline methods.     

Stealing PINs via mobile sensors: actual risk versus user perception

In this paper, we present the actual risks of stealing user PINs by using mobile sensors versus the perceived risks by users. First, we propose PINlogger.js which is a JavaScript-based side channel attack revealing user PINs on an Android mobile phone. In this attack, once the user visits a website controlled by an attacker, the JavaScript code embedded in the web page starts listening to the motion and orientation sensor streams without needing any permission from the user. By analysing these streams, it infers the user’s PIN using an artificial neural network. Based on a test set of fifty 4-digit PINs, PINlogger.js is able to correctly identify PINs in the first attempt with a success rate of 74% which increases to 86 and 94% in the second and third attempts, respectively. The high success rates of stealing user PINs on mobile devices via JavaScript indicate a serious threat to user security. With the technical understanding of the information leakage caused by mobile phone sensors, we then study users’ perception of the risks associated with these sensors. We design user studies to measure the general familiarity with different sensors and their functionality, and to investigate how concerned users are about their PIN being discovered by an app that has access to all these sensors. Our studies show that there is significant disparity between the actual and perceived levels of threat with regard to the compromise of the user PIN. We confirm our results by interviewing our participants using two different approaches, within-subject and between-subject, and compare the results. We discuss how this observation, along with other factors, renders many academic and industry solutions ineffective in preventing such side channel attacks.     

The ubiquitous camera: an in-depth study of camera phone use

Little in-depth data exists regarding what users actually do with their camera phones. Our goal was thus to understand how people use camera phone images for social and personal purposes and affective and functional purposes. We had two main objectives. The first was to explore the range and diversity of use to help broaden our outlook on current and future camera phone use. The second was to elucidate the characteristics and context of use for different activities to learn how we might better support such activities.     

一种基于物联网的摩托车报警器设计

本文主要设计了一种以超低功耗单片机MSP430G2855 为控制芯片的摩托车报警器,通过云服务器、手机APP 和报警器中的GPRS模块构建物联网。振动传感器和超声波传感器协同工作,振动传感器未检测到信号时,超声波传感器不 工作,降低了功耗,同时,超声波传感器用于判别是否有人靠近,降低了误报的概率。基于物联网,用户通过手机APP可实现对 于误报情况的处理,以及对于被盗摩托车的追踪。     

Context Awareness and Mobile Phones

This paper investigates some aspects of how context-awareness can support users of mobile phones, in particular the calling party. The use of mobile and stationary phones is discussed in relation to situational properties of a phone conversation, especially with regards to who might benefit from context-awareness in this context. An initial hypothesis is that mobile phone users communicate context information to each other (verbally) to a much higher degree than do stationary phone users. Mobile phone users could benefit much from context awareness technology, in particular when about to make a call, if they can receive context information regarding the person they are trying to reach prior to establishing the call. We argue that such technology should require low amounts of explicit user interaction, and could lead to less disrupting calls in inappropriate moments, as well as less frustration for the calling party when a call is not answered.     

Felt presence: the uncanny encounters with the numinous Other

Felt presence, a sensation that “someone is there”, is an integral part of our everyday experience. It can manifest itself in a variety of forms ranging from most subtle fleeting impressions to intense hallucinations of demonic assault or visions of the divine. Felt presence phenomenon outside of the context of neurological disorders is largely neglected and not well understood by contemporary science. This paper focuses on the experiential and expressive qualities of the phenomenon and attempts to bring forth the complexity and the richness of possibilities for inter- and intrasubjective awareness represented by these experiences. Are these simply misperceptions and hallucinations heightened and enforced by the mystical or superstitious mind? Or are these entities projections of our own “selves”, elements of self-estrangement? How are such experiences shaping our understanding of ourselves and of others? And finally, what is the interplay between intersubjective, private experiences and private or public spaces of dwelling?