DOET 5, and Race Sensor Musings

The six varieties of slips:
Capture error: I'll be writing something down and thinking about something else entirely, and eventually write out a few words of my actual thoughts.

Description error: Nearly pouring juice into my cereal before realizing the milk was the carton next to it.

Data-driven error: When numbers are in pairs (like '5252'), I tend to accidentally put them in threes ('525252').

Associative activation error: The start-up noise for a DS game I had gotten sounded an awful lot like my cell phone ring, so for the first ten times I'd play, I always thought I was getting a call once I turned the game on.

Loss-of-activation error: This happens to me all the damn time. Coming home from somewhere and forgetting what I was just doing, calling someone and forgetting what I was supposed to tell them. I remember one time, I literally said what I was going to ask out loud before I called, called the person, engaged in pleasantries for a few minutes, then completely forgot what I was going to ask. What a head case.

Mode error: The alarm on my DS has a confirmation screen before it actually sets itself, and once I did it too quickly, so I ended up being late because I never actually set the alarm.


Create a flowchart diagram of the set of interactions a person will undertake when interacting with your groups piece. Where are the potentials for error?

INITIAL REACTION:
The first interaction would be the actual looking at the project. This consolidated device on a shelf, with an attendant nearby standing at the ready. It'll be kind of a strange sight, but I think that's what will draw people in. A turnaround for this is that the human element in the piece may make one think it's a performance, and most people keep their distance from the performers thinking it would be rude. I guess the project is partly performance, but interaction is all part of it. From the performer anyway. Or the stamper. Whatever.

SCANNER INTERACTION:
The main interaction with the project is that of the scanner. An specifically marked area of the shelf unit will beckon people to lend their limbs into the machine for it to scan and analyze. Since the device will be marked as such, and will appear to be... semi-safe, I don't think this will be much of a problem.

HUMAN/STAMP INTERACTION:
This interaction is a bit tricky. Once the person is told (by the machine) what their race is, the attendant will reach for their hand, put a stamp on it, and send them on their merry way. The interaction with the attendant will be limited, and very cold and methodical, best emulating the device itself. A backfire of this is if the person chooses to make conversation or argue with the attendant, at which case the attendant could either ignore it, or come up with some ad-libbed thing to keep the people moving.


How do you personally memorize/retrieve information? Give examples.
For most information, I try to grasp the big ideas first, and then work my way down to the small stuff. That way I have big categories to plumb one by one, with everything linking together in groups. Connecting it to myself in some way can't hurt either. Like connecting it to some stupid bit from a show I remember or a joke I come up with. It sounds weird writing it, but it does work sometimes. Like in social problems, everything we've learned about how our education system is in the shitter I've pretty much linked to a Patton Oswalt routine where he talks about pretty much the same things.

What is the connectionist approach?
The connectionist approach seems to be like memory of a whole; every event in a certain situation all melded together into one solid category of memory. There's also discussion about how discrepancies to common events tend to be more prominent, even though they're statistically unlikely to occur. Like I run up the stairs to my apartment every day, and maybe one time I'll trip over myself. I'll probably remember that instance, even though it happened once out of the hundreds of times I've done it before.

Explain what is meant by the expressions, wide and deep structures and shallow structures. What are the potentials for each or perhaps only one of these types of structure in your group’s project?
Wide and deep structures give the user a wide number of selections to choose from, while a shallow structure has a more limited number. The former gives the person more of a freedom to make unique choices, but may be harder to gauge possible results for so many combinations, while the latter has more restrictive choices, but easier to gauge. Our project would fall under the shallow structure, since the person is really only required to do one thing: stick your arm under the sensor.

What activities must a person perform simultaneously when “doing” your groups’s project?
The person really is only expected to do one thing at a time: approach device, put arm under sensor, then allow hand to be stamped. Clear cut and to the point.



Now that that's done, I'd like to ramble on about some elements of our project. One part of it is giving me a headache thinking about, and that's the signaling of the race from the device. The step between the reading of the arm and the stamping. We've talked about using many things, from a light system to an automated voice, to a video display with culturally stereotyped music accompaniment. All of these ideas could potentially work within different projects, but I've always had a certain vision about this project. Although I've basically dropped the US Census idea, I've always thought of this machine to be very cold and mechanical. There still are connotations attached to it that this has to do with governmental labeling of race groups, but that's also lumped in with the connotations of racial judgments we make in our everyday lives. One is on a national, nay global level, and the other is subjective among select people. So the project is sort of walking a tightrope between completely detached to extremely attached to the idea of race; whether it be just a statistic, or a thought-out judgment attached to a stereotype. I always leaned toward the former, so I was just fine with a row of labeled lights, where one goes off depending on what the machine read. But then the question arose: what color would the lights be? I always thought red would work, since it felt like a good color for lights on a wacky machine; plus it was impartial to any skin color, as even regular white lights would be somewhat representative of white skin. But after some group brow-beating, I began to figure maybe that wasn't enough. Maybe a voice accompaniment would do better alongside it; like a computer-processed voice that would just say, "You are... black" or "You are... white" and so on. That would make the response more personal to each respondent, and also feel impersonal at the same time. Compromising rules.