Discount Usability: 20 Years (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
by karlcowSimple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristic evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design.
Simple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristic evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Library of Medicine® (NLM) undertook an 18-month project to evaluate, test and recommend digital repository software and systems to support NLM's collection and preservation of a wide variety of digital objects. This article outlines the methodology NLM used to analyze the landscape of repository software and select three systems for in-depth testing. Finally, the article discusses the evaluation results and next steps for NLM. This project followed an earlier NLM working group, which created functional requirements and identified key policy issues for an NLM digital repository to aid in building NLM's collection in the digital environment.
FOOXX is based on client-server-solution and the patented 'Personal Rank' technology. FOOXX "studies" the activity of its members as they surf and from this, learns the importance of the sites being used. How are the search results ranked? In contrast to conventional search engines, FOOXX does not rank its' sites exclusively according to content, but also through the evaluation of other users' interactions. Intensively used sites receive a higher ranking than sites which are only briefly visited. In this way, each internet site receives a ranking which really reflects its' value to the user. Attempts to manipulate don't stand a chance. FOOXX ranks sites fairly.
One of the infrastructure tools that we've identified for the future internal architecture of Second Life is messaging. Message queuing systems allow systems that send messages to not have to worry about how they will be delivered, and allow consumers of messages to gather whichever ones interest them, at their own pace.
And the winner is…
As software becomes more and more complex, it is more and more important to structure it well. Well-structured software is easy to write, easy to debug, and provides a collection of modules that can be re-used to reduce future programming costs. Conventional languages place conceptual limits on the way problems can be modularised. Functional languages push those limits back. In this paper we show that two features of functional languages in particular, higher-order functions and lazy evaluation, can contribute greatly to modularity. As examples, we manipulate lists and trees, program several numerical algorithms, and implement the alpha-beta heuristic (an algorithm from Artificial Intelligence used in game-playing programs). Since modularity is the key to successful programming, functional languages are vitally important to the real world.
Color-Structured Image Search
Jingdong Wang, Xian-Sheng Hua, and Yinghai Zhao
6 July 2009
In this paper, we propose a novel interactive image ranking technique, color-structured image search, by exploiting color spatial relation information, and demonstrate it in image research results refinement. This technique enables users to draw a few color strokes, called target color structure, to indicate the intent. Beyond the conventional image retrieval methods based on query by image content that simply view the target color structure as an image and compute the similarity merely according to the spatial correspondence criterion, the proposed method represents the target color structure using a set of spatially relational colors, and evaluates the similarities between target color structure and image color structure by exploiting their spatial correspondence information, and an extra novel criterion, the consistency of spatial relation of colors implied in target color structure, and even offering a scheme to handle the uncertainty of target color structure. This similarity evaluation process can be accomplished efficiently. Moreover, a convenient interactive interface is presented to allow users to specify target color structure flexibly. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.
An extensive evaluation of the Fedora Commons 3.0 and DSpace 1.5 digital document repository systems has been conducted. The evaluation aimed at selecting an open source software package that best satisfies the FAO Open Archive and FAO organizational requirements and the requirements for the storage, dissemination and preservation of documents and bibliographic metadata. Both repository systems were evaluated against thirty-two criteria chosen from nine core categories of requirements: community, security, functionality, integration, modularity, metadata, statistics and reports, preservation, and outputs. These criteria were selected with the merger of the FAODOC and FAO Corporate Document Repository (CDR) into the FAO Open Archive in mind.
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It was shown that for best results all the elements have to be included in the classification process. The exact way of combining the significance indicators turned out not to be overly important: using the F1 measure, the best combination of significance indicators yielded no more than 3 % higher performance results than the baseline.
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By completing this survey you will help inform development choices for those creating accessible web content. All screen reader users (even those that use screen readers only for evaluation and testing) are invited to participate.
Pure is a modern-style functional programming language based on term rewriting. It offers equational definitions with pattern matching, full symbolic rewriting capabilities, dynamic typing, eager and lazy evaluation, lexical closures, built-in list and matrix support and an easy-to-use C interface. The interpreter uses LLVM as a backend to JIT-compile Pure programs to fast native code. Pure is closely related to the author's Q language and is slated to eventually become its successor, since it offers many new and powerful features and programs run much faster than their Q equivalents.
I have given over two hundred and fifty presentations at national and international conferences. These include plenary addresses at conferences in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and Brazil. Here are the selected papers from my recent presentations. You can view the PowerPoint presentations by clicking on the titles. Energizing your classes: A learner-centered approach Brazil, July 2005 Developments in Curriculum Evaluation, Renewal and Design - PowerPoint slides ELICOS (English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students Association) Directors of Studies Conference, 13 May, 2005 What makes a good language learner? - PowerPoint slides TESOL Conference, Long Beach, California, USA, 31 March - 3 April, 2004 Nine steps to learner autonomy - PowerPoint slides Plenary speech, Shantou University, China, 13 March, 2004 ELT Curriculum, IT and learner autonomy - PowerPoint slides Featured presentation, KOTESOL Conference, 18-19 October, 2003 Analyze it! - An introduction to systemic-functional linguistics - PowerPoint slides Invited speech, Sophia University, Japan, 10 October, 2003 Strategies for successful listening and reading development TESOL Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 24- 29 March, 2003 Adding value to the ELT curriculum through IT - PowerPoint slides Plenary speech, The 9th TESOL Arabia Conference 2003, Al Bustan Rotana, Dubai, UAE, 12 - 14 March, 2003 Learning styles and strategies in the ESL classroom - PowerPoint slides Plenary speech, Illinois TESOL 29th Annual State Convention, Chicago, 28 February - 1 March, 2003 What is task-based language teaching? - PowerPoint slides Teaching writing - PowerPoint slides Teaching reading - PowerPoint slides Teaching listening in a second language - PowerPoint slides Featured speech, The 4th Pan-Asian conference, Taiwan, November 2002 English as a global language: counting the cost - PowerPoint slides Spotlight presentation, TESOL, Salt Lake City, April 2002 Performance-based approaches to the design of ESL Instruction Plenary presentation, Spain TESOL, Madrid, March 2002
On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the world's tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, an brought to jail before he was finally released.
MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that will assist you with your MySQL configuration and make recommendations for increased performance and stability. Within seconds, it will display statistics about your MySQL installation and the areas where it can be improved. It’s key to remember that MySQLTuner is a script which can assist you with your server, but it is not the solution to a badly performing MySQL server. The best performance gains come from a thorough review of the queries sent to the server, and an evaluation of the MySQL server itself. A qualified developer in your application’s programming or scripting language should be able to work with a MySQL database administrator to find improvements for your server. Once the server and application are optimized well, you may need to consider hardware upgrades to the physical server itself. This is a really useful tool for helping to optimize MySQL performance.Understanding the various my.cnf variables and how they affect performance can seem really complicated but this tool takes some of the pain away and makes it easier to understand the effects of each variable.It is especially useful to be able to see the global memory usage, memory usage per thread and the maximum possible memory usage - that is really valuable information that is otherwise complex to calculate.
MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that will assist you with your MySQL configuration and make recommendations for increased performance and stability. Within seconds, it will display statistics about your MySQL installation and the areas where it can be improved. It’s key to remember that MySQLTuner is a script which can assist you with your server, but it is not the solution to a badly performing MySQL server. The best performance gains come from a thorough review of the queries sent to the server, and an evaluation of the MySQL server itself. A qualified developer in your application’s programming or scripting language should be able to work with a MySQL database administrator to find improvements for your server. Once the server and application are optimized well, you may need to consider hardware upgrades to the physical server itself. This is a really useful tool for helping to optimize MySQL performance.Understanding the various my.cnf variables and how they affect performance can seem really complicated but this tool takes some of the pain away and makes it easier to understand the effects of each variable.It is especially useful to be able to see the global memory usage, memory usage per thread and the maximum possible memory usage - that is really valuable information that is otherwise complex to calculate.
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Expressions evaluation has a high runtime cost; web performance experts recommend avoiding them to improve front-end performance
Chercheurs, Documentalistes, Étudiants ont à gérer de plus en plus de documents. Face à une offre dense de logiciels de gestion de références bibliographiques et afin d’aider les utilisateurs dans leurs choix, le service veille de l’INIST-CNRS a lancé en juin 2008 un projet de benchmarking sur ces outils : ECLORE.
The EU-funded MultiMatch project aims to overcome language barriers and media and distribution problems currently affecting access to on-line cultural heritage material. Partners are developing a vertical search engine able to harvest heterogeneous information from distributed sources and present it in a synthesized manner. To design such a system, user requirements were initially gathered and then translated into specific design features to ensure that the search engine developed was consistent with user needs. This paper presents these user requirements, the initial design of the MultiMatch system, and technical discussion of the system architecture and components used to turn these design implications into a working interactive prototype. Following this, we discuss user evaluation and present results from an initial user study. These are being used, in addition to other input, to drive the functionality and design of the final system.
Jazz is a new technology from IBM Rational designed for collaborative software delivery. This Software Evaluation Kit includes everything you need to get started with Jazz products.