Monthly Archives: April 2016

Phil 4.11.16

7:00 – 3:00 VTX

  • Make MOLST appointment today
  • Working on the outline
  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology. Done! Meaty.
    • Page 907: While the relationship between human-like trust and outcomes is stronger in most cases, system-like trust still matters (see Figure 2). This may be because, in part, Facebook is a tool that helps one do social networking. I think this is important. When a tool has high system trust in a social context, it disappears, while the social aspect comes to the fore. This is true even if the tool is performing hidden tasks that influence the social interaction. This is related to relevance and pertinence, I think. As long as the social cies are presented in a way that feels pertinent (and is reliable?), it’s trusted explicitly as a system and implicitly as a player in the social interaction.
    • Clifford Nass, Byron Reeves
  • ——————————-
  • TODOs in GoogleCSE2 buildQueryObjects() and buildNewQueryObjects():
    • Modify to take SmartTerm Object
      If there is a valid term, then create the query with po.getNamePermutations()
  • Finished. Building a new (small!) set of people to test with
  • Discussed how order affects search results with Andy. Need to think about that
  • Had an idea about running overspecified queries that return nothing, then backing off term by term until a hit. Running through the permutations that have very small numbers of hits looking for common hits might be a good way of getting good results?

Phil 4.8.16

7:00 – 4:30 VTX

  • Here’s the new link for Microsoft Cognitive Services
  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology.
    • Page 906: Among the five factors, social presence correlated the highest with humanness for both Facebook (0.48) and Access (0.56). Also noteworthy is that for Access, the correlation between humanness and animation was high (0.51), whereas for Facebook it was not (0.31). Further, dynamism correlated somewhat higher with humanness for Access (0.39) than for Facebook (0.23). These interesting differences show that each technology likely has a general humanness that finds its basis in different factors
      • This leads me to believe that ‘humanness’ is not exactly what they are testing here. Responsiveness can be used to discriminate between different types of tires (WRT cornering), and I don’t think anyone would call one tire more or less human than another. I think this also applies to the animation test. Social presence though makes a lot of sense.
      • It did just strike me that partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM – [XLstat’s definition and tutorial) would be a *great* way of evaluating trustworthiness and credibility cues. This should be part of the research part of the study?
    • Page 906: Our study 2 findings raise a related question: instead of considering humanness a general construct measured with three items like we did, could one theorize humanness as a second-order construct that is reflected by specific first-order factors that are components of social presence, social affordances,and affordances for sociality? Researchers exploring such a second-order construct could integrate it into a nomological humanness network.
      • Hah! See my second comment for the previous quotation.
    • Page 907: Researchers should try to determine differences between these respondents and those who ranked one or both technologies at or above the midpoint. Researchers could also perform a cluster analysis to identify groups with common responses to the humanness items of which a group with low humanness scores might emerge. It could be that the humanness factors identified in study 2 are more or less important in indicating humanness based on cluster membership. It could also be that results from study 1 about the importance of trust type might differ by humanness cluster.
      • This could also be a component of trust/credibility analysis.
    • Paper structure thoughts
  • —————————
  • Set the persistence.xml to point to the Talend DB
  • Created the DB
  • Added users
    • Phil
    • Aaron
    • Margarita
    • Andy
    • John
  • Need to figure out how to come up with a list of names/terms/CSEs to start evaluating
  • Need to test fully functional app, then package and deploy
  • Need to have VTX get a SemRush account
  • Conference Call with John, Margarita and Andy about setting up the Crawl for this weekend. John will get back to me with some known bad actors
  • Need to associate search terms with an optionalString element
  • Monday’s TODOs in GoogleCSE2 buildQueryObjects() and buildNewQueryObjects():
    • Modify to take SmartTerm Object
      If there is a valid term, then create the query with po.getNamePermutations()

Phil 4.7.16

From Communications of the ACM’s Kode Vicious column: To understand the first downside, you should find a friend who works on compilers and ask if he or she has ever looked inside gcc (GNU C compiler), and, after the crying stops and you have bolstered your friend’s spirits, ask if he or she has ever tried to extend the compiler. If you are still friends at that point, your final question should be about submitting patches upstream into this supposedly open source project.

Yup.

7:00 – 4:30 VTX

  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology.
    • Page 894: trust is most often treated as a psychological construct (i.e., trusting
      beliefs). As a psychological construct, trusting beliefs exists apart from any attempt to measure it (Schwab, 1980). Yet knowing what the construct means helps one to measure it properly. Hence, the trusting beliefs construct will influence its components. Third, we used reflective first-order factors because we did not seek to explain variance in trusting beliefs.

      • So trust can be measured using inferential models? As an influence system maybe???
    • At 6.2. Study 2: Methodology, page 903. The second study is more related to the credibility cues that people use to determine the humanness of an interface. Not sure if it’s relevant to what I’m working on, but it is interesting to see how they include the second study which follows up on the open questions from the first.
  • In the paper above, they use something called partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). SmartPLS is a system that uses this, and there’s a presentation on YouTube that shows how it’s used to predict shadow banking. Need to look into this some more as a way of predicting outcomes based on behavior.
  • ———————–
  • Sent an email to John and Bob about using the new CSEs
  • Set up the rating app so that Andy and Margarita can use it to create the json characterization. Had a hell of a time getting the executable jar built. The artifact builder in Intellij doesn’t synchronize with the dev process. I was not including jars that were required and getting a “Error: A JNI error has occurred, please check your installation and try again” error on execution. I wound up having to delete the artifact, commit, create a new artifact and then create the jar and executable.
  • Sent the Rating app as a zip. Not sure if the filters are letting it through. Hey! It works!
  • Sent Aaron a rant on what I’d like to get the db up and running. Done! Yay!
  • Finalized REST discussions with Jeremy

Phil 4.6.16

7:00 – 3:30 VTX

  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology.
    • Really nice layout of hypothesis
    • Really nice layout of methods
      • They even have the questionnaire!
    • At section 4.2. Measurement Items, page 893.
  • ———————-
  • Mercer Marketplace wants more documentation….
  • Conference call with Andy and Margarita about flags and rating. Theresa joined in at the end.
  • Rediscovering all my postgres notes
  • added a role for a non-super-user who can create databases
  • created a new googlecse2 database
  • added postgres jdbc driver
  • Aaaaand JPA works! Db created and users added. Password checking behaves!
  • Set up my postgres to accept external access by following these directions
  • Waiting for Gregg on DB access
  • Chatted with Jeremy about a RESTful interface to extract flag data. More tomorrow

Phil 4.5.16

7:00 – 4:30 VTX

  • Had a good discussion with Patrick yesterday. He’s approaching his wheelchair work from a Heideggerian framework, where the controls may be present-at-hand or ready-to-hand. I think those might be frameworks that apply to non-social systems (Hammers, Excel, Search), while social systems more align with being-with. The evaluation of trustworthiness is different. True in a non-social sense is a property of exactness; a straightedge may be true or out-of-true. In a social sense, true is associated with a statement that is in accordance with reality.
  • While reading Search Engine Agendas  in Communications of the ACM, I came upon a mention of Frank Pasquale, who wrote an article on the regulation of Search, given its impact (Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness, and Accountability in the Law of Search). The point of Search Engine Agendas is that the ranking of political candidates affects people’s perception of them (higher is better) This ties into my thoughts from March 29th. That there are situations where the idea of ordering among pertinent documents may be problematic and further that how users might interact with the ordering process might be instructive.
  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology.
  • ————————
  • Added the sites Andy and Margarita found to the blacklist and updated the repo
  • Theresa has some sites too – in process.
  • Finished my refactoring party – more debugging than I was expecting
  • Converted the Excela spreadsheet to JSON and read the whole thing in. Need to do that just for a subsample now.
  • Added a request from Andy about creating a JSON object for the comments in the flag dismissal field.
  • Worked with Gregg about setting up the postgres db.

Phil 4.4.16

7:00 – 2:30 VTX

  • Happy perfect square day.
  • Continuing Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology.
    • Page 833: Ability/competence is the belief that a person has the skills, competencies, and characteristics that enable them to have influence in some specific domain. Benevolence is the belief that a person will want to do good to the trustor aside from an egocentric profit motive. Integrity is the belief that a person adheres to an acceptable set of principles.
    • Page 833: It is not as clear, however, whether technologies have volition or can make ethical decisions without being pre-programmed to do so. Because of this issue, some researchers have developed alternative trust belief constructs that do not assume technologies have volition or ethical decision making capability. For example, Lippert and Swiercz (2005) use utility, reliability, and predictiveness, and Söellner, Hoffman, Hoffman, Wacker, and Leimester (2012) use performance, process, and purpose to represent technology-trusting beliefs.
    • Page 833: We adopt McKnight et al.’s (2011) conceptualization of system-like trust in a technology’s reliability, functionality, and helpfulness to measure trust in technology because these three attributes were directly derived from, and are corollaries to, the human-like trust attributes of integrity, competence, and benevolence
  • The discussion on affordances started me thinking about SERPs again. This is kind of related but almost more basic – how users search within documents using find: The Myth of Find: User Behaviour and Attitudes Towards the Basic Search Feature. and the documents that cite (WRT document triage, etc) are also pretty interesting looking.
  • ———————————
  • Starting up the computers after the weekend at work today, and Skype For Business doesn’t let me log in. Says my email address is bad. And it’s not.
  • Got the PoiOptionalStrings object integrated and running.
  • Realized that I need to have a generalized ‘OptionalContent’ class. generalizing from above.
  • Need to see how JQL works with all this new stuff now.
    • Fancy JPQL query of the day: 
      @NamedQuery(name = "PoiObject.getFromOptionalStrings", query = "SELECT p from poi_object p, IN (p.optStringSet) os WHERE os.name = :name AND os.value = :value"),
    • Should I be doing this as a template? If so, what does the table get named?

Phil 4.1.16

7:15 – 4:15 VTX

  • Had a bunch of paperwork to do for my folks. All handled now?
  • Continuing What is Trust? A Conceptual Analysis and An Interdisciplinary Model. Done
    • Disposition to Trust. This construct means the extent to which one displays a consistent tendency to be willing to depend on general others across a broad spectrum of situations and persons
      • a general propensity to be willing to depend on others.
      • does not necessarily imply that one believes others to be trustworthy
      • only has a major effect on one’s trust-related behavior when novel
        situations arise, in which the person and situation are unfamiliar
      • Disposition to Trust has two subconstructs, Faith in Humanity and Trusting Stance
        • Faith in Humanity means one assumes others are usually upright, well-meaning, and dependable.
        • Trusting Stance means that, regardless of what one assumes about other people generally, one assumes that one will achieve better outcomes by dealing with people as though they are well-meaning and reliable
      • Because Faith in Humanity relates to assumptions about peoples’ attributes, it is more likely to be an antecedent to Trusting Beliefs (in people) than is Trusting Stance. Trusting Stance may relate more to Trusting Intention, which, depending on the situation, is probably not based wholly on beliefs about the other person.
    • Institution-based Trust means one believes the needed conditions are in place to enable one to anticipate a successful outcome in an endeavor or aspect of one’s life
      • This construct comes from the sociology tradition that people can rely on others because of structures, situations, or roles  that provide assurances (Affordances???) that things will go well
      • Institution-based Trust has two subconstructs, Structural Assurance and Situational Normality.
        • Structural Assurance means one believes that success is likely because guarantees, contracts, regulations, promises, legal recourse, processes, or procedures are in place that assure success
        • Situational Normality means one believes that success is likely because the situation is normal or favorable. (I think that this comes from very primitive parts of our brains. It can be observed in many animals and may be one of those things that separates infant and adult behavior. If you trust too much, you are likely to get eaten..?)
          • Situational Normality means that a properly ordered setting is likely to facilitate a successful venture. When one believes one’s role and others’ roles in the situation are appropriate and conducive to success, then one has a basis for trusting the people in the situation.
          • likely related to Trusting Beliefs and Trusting Intention. A system developer who feels good about the roles and setting in which they work is likely to have Trusting Beliefs about the people in that setting.
    • Trusting Beliefs means one believes (and feels confident in believing) that the other person has one or more traits desirable to one in a situation in which negative consequences are possible.
      • We distinguish four main trusting belief subconstructs, while recognizing that others exist.
        • Trusting Belief-Competence means one believes the other person has the ability or power to do for one what one needs done.
        • Trusting Belief-Benevolence means one believes the other person cares about one and is motivated to act in one’s interest.  A benevolent person does not act opportunistically.
        • Trusting Belief-Integrity means one believes the other person makes good faith agreements, tells the truth, and fulfills promises
        • Trusting Belief-Predictability means one believes the other person’s actions (good or bad) are consistent enough that one can forecast them in a given situation
    • Trusting Intention means one is willing to depend on, or intends to depend on, the other person in a given task or situation  with a feeling of relative security, even though negative consequences are possible
      • Trusting intention subconstructs include Willingness to Depend and Subjective Probability of Depending.
        • Willingness to Depend means one is volitionally prepared to make oneself vulnerable to the other person in a situation by relying on them.
        • Subjective Probability of Depending means the extent to which one forecasts or predicts that one will depend on the other person.
      • Trusting Intention definitions embody five elements synthesized from the trust literature.
        1. The possibility of negative consequences or risk is what makes trust important but problematic.
        2. A readiness to depend or rely on another is central to trusting intention.
        3. A feeling of security means one feels safe, assured, and comfortable (not anxious or fearful) about the prospect of depending on another. Feelings of security reflect the affective side of trusting intention.
        4. Trusting intention is situation-specific.(???? why? Examples?)
        5. Trusting intention involves willingness that is not based on having control or power over the other party. Note that Trusting Intention relates well to the system development power literature because we define it in terms of dependence and control.
    • Another limitation relates to Whetten’s (1989) recommendation that Who and Where conditions should be placed around models.  Whereas we have assumed that the model applies to any kind of relationship between two people (Who) in any situation (Where), this may not be the case. Empirical research is needed to better define the boundary conditions of the model.
  • Starting Technology, Humanness, and Trust: Rethinking Trust in Technology, also by D. Harrison McKnight
    • Page 881 (Basic?) Social Trust: human-like trust constructs of integrity, ability/competence, and benevolence that researchers have traditionally used to measure interpersonal trust.
    • Page 881 (Basic?) System Trust: system-like trust constructs such as reliability,
      functionality, and helpfulness
    • Page 881. First, we hypothesize that technologies can differ in humanness. Second, we predict that users will develop trust in the technology differently depending on whether they perceive it as more or less human-like, which will result in human-like trust having a stronger.  influence on outcomes for more human-like technologies and system-like trust having a stronger influence on outcomes for more system-like technologies. (Cite Kate Bush Deeper Understanding 1989)
    • Here’s the beginning of a thought: What is self-trust? Just thinking about it, it seems to be a sense of the reliability of my future self to do what my present self desires. That’s different from Social Trust, which in the literature is more about integrity, competence and benevolence. It seems closer to system trust in that reliability and functionality are more significant. There are things that I trust that I will do tomorrow: Get up, go to work, exercise if the weather is good enough. But there are also things that I can’t trust myself to do. My future self will almost certainly eat more calories than my current self desires. My grocery shopping behaviors are based around this lack of trust. There are items that I do not bring into my house because I know that they will get eaten (I was going to write that I know that my will is weak around chocolate, but that’s not really it. Or at least, that’s not all of it, or maybe even most of it..). Because (interactive?) information technology is more like a self-amplifier, I wonder if what we think of system trust can be thought of as the trust in ourselves, but the part of ourselves that is more reliable and trustworthy. A search tomorrow will work as well as a search today. Maybe better. And the effectiveness of that search reflect somehow my ability to interact effectively with the external world? This is starting to sound a lot my point of view that living a life in prolonged contact with a compiler changes you in profound ways.
    • So what would that mean? I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis to change search results from focusing on pertinence to revelation. This does not mean that the ‘Ten Blue Links’ need to go away. But it does imply that peripheral information could be just as important, so that a less casually polarized worldview might be developed.
  • Finishing up the CSE version control setup – need to write up the process for confluence – done.
  • Since I need to be able to now read in the Excella data, I was going to look to Gregg’s ontology as a way to determine the table structure. But it’s way too big and nested. In a Person’s description includes a reference to a complete organization, activities, charges, arrests, and it doesn’t even have room for nice things yet (will we have co-authors?). Anyway, To avoid this, I’m going to have basic person characteristics with an associated  StringMaps, NumMaps and DateMaps. Anything that’s not recognized as a column gets added to that. Need to see how persistence will work with that in some testing first.
  • Got the code working. JPA 2 says you should be able to build a map entirely without annotations, but I couldn’t get it to work. Modified JsonLoadable so that it goes through the Json Object and anything that is not a member of the current class is added to HashMaps of PoiOptionalStrings. It should be very straightforward to extend to number and date types. Probably worth doing?