Download or read book Computer Factoids written by Kirk Kirksey and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computers are those unfathomable contraptions everyone everywhere loves to hate. We can't live with them, but we can't live without them. Contempt for our byte-based existence has developed universal appeal crossing boundaries of culture, economics, religion, and language. Everyone you know has a "those stupid computers" story. If you think you have heard it all, STOP. The digital revolution began in 1951. Computer Factoids chronicles behind-the-scenes digital weirdness from Day One. Kirk Kirksey covers the landscape of computer history, cyber legend, digital mythology, and Internet lore. Put away your pocket protector because you won't find any techno-babble on these pages. Each of these 39 high-tech yarns is an easy-read with a serious dose of attitude. Whether it is a computer powered by rotting potatoes or a symphony performed by obsolete dot-matrix printers or a computerized bra equipped with a modem, these tales of the digital surreal will make you stand up and shout, "Honey, you're not going to believe this."
Download or read book Smarter Than You Think written by Clive Thompson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory and timely look at how technology boosts our cognitive abilities—making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever It’s undeniable—technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding “yes.” In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson shows that every technological innovation—from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph—has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But, as in the past, we adapt—learning to use the new and retaining what is good of the old. Smarter Than You Think embraces and extols this transformation, presenting an exciting vision of the present and the future.
Download or read book The Persona Lifecycle written by John Pruitt and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2010-08-04 with total page 741 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Persona Lifecycle is a field guide exclusively focused on interaction design's most popular new technique. The Persona Lifecycle addresses the "how" of creating effective personas and using those personas to design products that people love. It doesn't just describe the value of personas; it offers detailed techniques and tools related to planning, creating, communicating, and using personas to create great product designs. Moreover, it provides rich examples, samples, and illustrations to imitate and model. Perhaps most importantly, it positions personas not as a panacea, but as a method used to complement other user-centered design (UCD) techniques including scenario-based design, cognitive walkthroughs and user testing. The authors developed the Persona Lifecycle model to communicate the value and practical application of personas to product design and development professionals. This book explores the complete lifecycle of personas, to guide the designer at each stage of product development. It includes a running case study with rich examples and samples that demonstrate how personas can be used in building a product end-to-end. It also presents recommended best practices in techniques, tools, and innovative methods and contains hundreds of relevant stories, commentary, opinions, and case studies from user experience professionals across a variety of domains and industries. This book will be a valuable resource for UCD professionals, including usability practitioners, interaction designers, technical writers, and program managers; programmers/developers who act as the interaction designers for software; and those professionals who work with developers and designers. Features* Presentation and discussion of the complete lifecycle of personas, to guide the designer at each stage of product development.* A running case study with rich examples and samples that demonstrate how personas can be used in building a product end-to-end. * Recommended best practices in techniques, tools, and innovative methods.* Hundreds of relevant stories, commentary, opinions, and case studies from user experience professionals across a variety of domains and industries.
Download or read book User Experience Re Mastered written by Chauncey Wilson and published by Morgan Kaufmann. This book was released on 2009-09-11 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: User Experience Re-Mastered: Your Guide to Getting the Right Design provides an understanding of key design and development processes aimed at enhancing the user experience of websites and web applications. The book is organized into four parts. Part 1 deals with the concept of usability, covering user needs analysis and card sorting—a tool for shaping information architecture in websites and software applications. Part 2 focuses on idea generation processes, including brainstorming; sketching; persona development; and the use of prototypes to validate and extract assumptions and requirements that exist among the product team. Part 3 presents core design principles and guidelines for website creation, along with tips and examples on how to apply these principles and guidelines. Part 4 on evaluation and analysis discusses the roles, procedures, and documents needed for an evaluation session; guidelines for planning and conducting a usability test; the analysis and interpretation of data from evaluation sessions; and user interface inspection using heuristic evaluation and other inspection methods. - A guided, hands-on tour through the process of creating the ultimate user experience – from testing, to prototyping, to design, to evaluation - Provides tried and tested material from best sellers in Morgan Kaufmann's Series in Interactive Technologies, including leaders in the field such as Bill Buxton and Jakob Nielsen - Features never before seen material from Chauncey Wilson's forthcoming, and highly anticipated Handbook for User Centered Design
Download or read book The Essential Persona Lifecycle written by Tamara Adlin and published by Morgan Kaufmann. This book was released on 2010-03-20 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas offers a practical guide to the creation and use of personas, which can help product designers, their team, and their organization become more user focused. This book is for people who just need to know what to do and what order to do it in. It is completely focused on practical tools and methods, without much explanation on why the particular tool or method is the right one. The book discusses the five phases of persona lifecycle: - Family planning — Basic ideas and a few tools that will help one get organized - Conception and gestation — Step-by-step instructions to move from assumptions to completed personas - Birth and maturation — Strategic techniques to get the right information about ones personas out to ones your teammates at the right time - Adulthood — Specific tools that will ensure that ones personas are used by the right people at the right times and in the right ways during the product development cycle - Lifetime achievement and retirement — Basic ideas and a few tools to you measure the success of the persona effort and prepare for the next one - Practical and immediately applicable how-to reference guide for building and using personas – from planning, creating, launching, evaluating, and determining ROI - Invaluable guide that gives you a quick reference for incorporating personas into a product development process - Features all the essential how-to material from its parent book, The Persona Lifecycle, as a quick, at your fingertips companion
Download or read book Racing the Beam written by Nick Montfort and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the relationship between platform and creative expression in the Atari VCS, the gaming system for popular games like Pac-Man and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home video game market so completely that “Atari” became the generic term for a video game console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential video game console from both computational and cultural perspectives. Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. This book, the first in a series of Platform Studies, does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto), by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games. Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS—often considered merely a retro fetish object—is an essential part of the history of video games.
Download or read book Human Computer Interaction written by Andrew Sears and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2009-03-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed on first publication as a compendium of foundational principles and cutting-edge research, The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook has become the gold standard reference in this field. Derived from select chapters of this groundbreaking resource, Human-Computer Interaction: The Development Practice addresses requirements specification, desig
Download or read book Maximum PC written by and published by . This book was released on 2001-09 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maximum PC is the magazine that every computer fanatic, PC gamer or content creator must read. Each and every issue is packed with punishing product reviews, insightful and innovative how-to stories and the illuminating technical articles that enthusiasts crave.
Download or read book The Social Norms Approach to Preventing School and College Age Substance Abuse written by H. Wesley Perkins and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2003-02-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Social Norms Approach to Preventing School and College Age Substance Abuse offers educators, counselors, and clinicians a handbook for understanding and implementing a new and highly successful alternative to traditional methods for preventing substance abuse among young people. The proven "social norms" approach outlined in this book identifies young people's dramatic misperceptions about their peer norms and promotes accurate public reporting of actual positive norms that exist in all student populations. The contributors to this important book are the originators, pioneers, and active proponents of this new approach. Many of them have successfully applied the social norms approach in secondary and higher education settings and as a result have promoted healthier lifestyles among adolescents and young adults across the United States.
Download or read book Freak Frat written by Nicki Greenwood and published by North Star Press, LLC. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s hard getting a life when you’re undead. Freshman Year Checklist: * Find the bit-and-run girl who turned me into a vampire * Join supernatural beings support group * Call Dad * Cram for midterms * Find out who’s trying to kill me Joe Dietrich has a lot on his plate: college classes, a lonely divorced dad, and a weirdo gamer roommate. Oh, yeah, and that vampire thing. If only he didn’t have a supernatural hit squad after him...or a frenemy who’d rather take his head off than teach him to be a Supernat. If Joe can survive all that, final exams ought to be a piece of cake. Good thing he hasn’t tried asking that Grim Reaper girl out on a date.
Download or read book Ambient Rhetoric written by Thomas J. Rickert and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2013-05-10 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ambient Rhetoric, Thomas Rickert seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the rhetorical tradition and its basic dichotomy of subject and object. With the advent of new technologies, new media, and the dispersion of human agency through external information sources, rhetoric can no longer remain tied to the autonomy of human will and cognition as the sole determinants in the discursive act. Rickert develops the concept of ambience in order to engage all of the elements that comprise the ecologies in which we exist. Culling from Martin Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology in Being and Time, Rickert finds the basis for ambience in Heidegger's assertion that humans do not exist in a vacuum; there is a constant and fluid relation to the material, informational, and emotional spaces in which they dwell. Hence, humans are not the exclusive actors in the rhetorical equation; agency can be found in innumerable things, objects, and spaces. As Rickert asserts, it is only after we become attuned to these influences that rhetoric can make a first step toward sufficiency. Rickert also recalls the foundational Greek philosophical concepts of kairos (time), chora (space/place), and periechon (surroundings) and cites their repurposing by modern and postmodern thinkers as "informational scaffolding" for how we reason, feel, and act. He discusses contemporary theory in cognitive science, rhetoric, and object-oriented philosophy to expand his argument for the essentiality of ambience to the field of rhetoric. Rickert then examines works of ambient music that incorporate natural and artificial sound, spaces, and technologies, finding them to be exemplary of a more fully resonant and experiential media. In his preface, Rickert compares ambience to the fermenting of wine—how its distinctive flavor can be traced to innumerable factors, including sun, soil, water, region, and grape variety. The environment and company with whom it's consumed further enhance the taste experience. And so it should be with rhetoric—to be considered among all of its influences. As Rickert demonstrates, the larger world that we inhabit (and that inhabits us) must be fully embraced if we are to advance as beings and rhetors within it.
Download or read book The Human Computer Interaction Handbook written by Andrew Sears and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2007-09-19 with total page 1386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition of The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook provides an updated, comprehensive overview of the most important research in the field, including insights that are directly applicable throughout the process of developing effective interactive information technologies. It features cutting-edge advances to the scientific
Download or read book Maximum PC written by and published by . This book was released on 2001-11 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maximum PC is the magazine that every computer fanatic, PC gamer or content creator must read. Each and every issue is packed with punishing product reviews, insightful and innovative how-to stories and the illuminating technical articles that enthusiasts crave.
Download or read book The Art of Clean Code written by Christian Mayer and published by No Starch Press. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn eight principles to simplify your code and become a more effective (and successful) programmer. Most software developers waste thousands of hours working with overly complex code. The eight core principles in The Art of Clean Coding will teach you how to write clear, maintainable code without compromising functionality. The book’s guiding principle is simplicity: reduce and simplify, then reinvest energy in the important parts to save you countless hours and ease the often onerous task of code maintenance. Bestselling author Christian Mayer leverages his experience helping thousands perfect their coding skills in this new book. With expert advice and real-world examples, he’ll show you how to: Concentrate on the important stuff with the 80/20 principle -- focus on the 20% of your code that matters most Avoid coding in isolation: create a minimum viable product to get early feedback Write code cleanly and simply to eliminate clutter Avoid premature optimization that risks over-complicating code Balance your goals, capacity, and feedback to achieve the productive state of Flow Apply the Do One Thing Well philosophy to vastly improve functionality Design efficient user interfaces with the Less is More principle Tie your new skills together into one unifying principle: Focus The Python-based The Art of Clean Coding is suitable for programmers at any level, with ideas presented in a language-agnostic manner.
Download or read book Computers Helping People with Special Needs written by Klaus Miesenberger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-07-09 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-volume set LNCS 7382 and 7383 constiutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs, ICCHP 2012, held in Linz, Austria, in July 2012. The 147 revised full papers and 42 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 364 submissions. The papers included in the second volume are organized in the following topical sections: portable and mobile systems in assistive technology; assistive technology, HCI and rehabilitation; sign 2.0: ICT for sign language users: information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration; computer-assisted augmentative and alternative communication; easy to Web between science of education, information design and speech technology; smart and assistive environments: ambient assisted living; text entry for accessible computing; tactile graphics and models for blind people and recognition of shapes by touch; mobility for blind and partially sighted people; and human-computer interaction for blind and partially sighted people.
Download or read book Winn L Rosch Hardware Bible written by Winn L. Rosch and published by Que Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 1150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the potential of Pentium processors, the function of the motherboard, disk interfaces, safety issues, mass storage technology, display systems, parallel and infared ports, and audio technology.
Download or read book Service learning and the Liberal Arts written by Craig A. Rimmerman and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book evaluates service-learning within the context of a liberal arts education from a variety of disciplines. Contributors have written chapters that have practical appeal to other teachers and students interested in developing their own service-learning courses and connecting those courses to broader issues of citizenship and democracy.
