Traffic advisories can be delivered to assist travelers in avoiding congested areas and reaching their destinations in a timely manner. Instead of relying on a user to manually enter travel routes and times, we propose a prototype application that learns from the user's travel history and automatically predicts the user's destinations and routes. Traffic flow information is then accessed to det...

Gender gaps may be observed in a variety of economic and social environments. One of the possible determining factors is that men are more competitive than women and so, when the competitiveness of the environment increases, the performance of men increases relative to that of women. We test this hypothesis in a field study conducted with 9-year old children, running on a track. They first run ...

Browsing is one of the methods used for finding and refinding information on the web or in the file local system and there are opportunities to avoid this, particularly if that information is revisited frequently. We present empirical results from a field study contrasting patterns of browsing to local and web information and we qualify the cost that this navigation method incurs. In addition, ...

Decades of research have explored factors that can influence green behavior. However, much less is known about how technology in general, and social technologies in particular can motivate people to participate in green activities. In this paper we describe the goals, design and evaluation of StepGreen.org, a site intended to promote energy-saving behaviors. We present the results of a field st...

What affects people’s behavior when they dispose items? The distance hypothesis predicts that the number of misplaced items is a function of the distance of an appropriate bin. We categorized and mapped bins at 140 locations on the campus of a major research university in the Midwest and calculated the distances between adjacent bins. The distance hypothesis predicts that users dispose more rec...

This paper focuses on how to design and conduct phonetic experiments with speakers of Pacific Northwest languages of North America, focusing on two main topics: 1) challenges related to eliciting data and 2) ethical considerations.

— The state of Andhra Pradesh, India, provides a case study of a liberalization program with an emphasis on women’s empowerment. Based on the state budget data and fieldwork data from two villages, this paper investigates the content of this policy regime to argue that women’s empowerment policies were ultimately constrained by the policy context of liberalization. The state lowered shares of e...

While ethnography is an established part of CSCW research, teaching and learning ethnography presents unique and distinct challenges. This paper discusses a study of fieldwork and analysis amongst a group of students learning ethnography as part of a CSCW & design course. Studying the students’ practices we explore fieldwork as a learning experience, both learning about fieldsites as well as le...

We welcome the opportunity to discuss the ideas set forth in our research paper on the DeKalb mounds in northeastern Illinois (Curry et al., 2010). Our ongoing field research on these features has led us to ask new questions about their origin and ontogeny beyond what is discussed here, perhaps providing future graduate students with intriguing research opportunities (Petras, 2010; Curry and Pe...

Despite favorable attitudes being critical to the viability of multirater systems, little is known about the factors that impact rater attitudes. Results from a field study demonstrated that perceptions of organizational politics negatively relate to rater acceptance and cost-benefit evaluations and that these relationships were not moderated by one’s understanding, control, or rater perspectiv...