Gumption

Snoop: An Investigation into Possessions, Perceptions, Projections and Personalities

Sam Gosling's new book - Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You - blends an engaging and accessible overview of some of the key concepts and research findings in personality psychology and environmental psychology with what amounts to a collection of short detective stories. Snoopology, the art and science of determining "which of your tastes and habits provide particular portals into your personality", attempts to differentiate what our stuff really says about us from what most people might think our stuff says about us.

A snoopologist looks for three basic types of clues to personality - one's "unique pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving that is consistent over time" - in the personal spaces (e.g., bedrooms and bathrooms in the home, and offices or cubicles at work) that we inhabit:

• identity claims: posters, awards, photos, trinkets and other mementos that make deliberate symbolic statements about how we see ourselves that can be for our benefit (self-directed identity claims) or intended for others (other-directed identity claims)
• feeling regulators: family photos, keepsakes, music, books and videos that help us manage our emotions and thoughts
• behavior residue: the physical traces left in the environment by our everyday actions (e.g., objects on our desks, on our floors or in our garbage)

The "big five" personality traits, which I first encountered (and wrote about) in the context of YouJustGetMe, a web site for guessing these traits (and an associated ICWSM 2008 paper on which Sam was co-author), are here enumerated along with well-known icons who exemplify these traits:

• Openness: Leonardo da Vinci; creative, imaginative, abstract, curious, deep thinkers, inventive and value arts and aesthetic experiences.
• Conscientiousness: RoboCop; thorough, dependable, reliable, hard-working, task-focused, efficient, good planners.
• Extraversion: Axel Foley (Beverly Hills Cop); talkative, energetic, enthusiastic, assertive, outgoing, sociable.
• Agreeableness: Fred Rogers; helpful, selfless, sympathetic, kind, forgiving, trusting, considerate, cooperative.
• Neuroticism: Woody Allen; anxious, easily ruffled or upset, worried, moody.

In exploring what it really means to know someone, Sam reviews some of the work by Dan McAdams, including McAdams' book, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, which describes three levels of intimacy:

• traits: the "big five" dimensions of personality listed above
• personal concerns: roles, goals, skills and values
• identity: the thread that ties the experiences of our past, present and future into one narrative

In discussing these levels of intimacy, Sam notes that Arthur Aron has developed a two-person "sharing game" consisting of a sequence of 36 questions that slowly escalate the level of disclosure between two people, enabling them to progress from the first to the second level of intimacy. Unfortunately, the sharing game does not appear to be available online (though a journal paper describing the system is available for a fee),

The "sharing game" reminds me of OneKeyAway, a dating service that adds some new twists to "lock-and-key" parties, in which women are given locks and men are given keys - both worn on lanyards around their necks - and prizes are awarded to couples who find matching locks and keys, offering incentives to both easily engage and disengage throughout the course of a party. I've written an entire blog post about lock-and-key parties and OneKeyAway; here I'll simply note a few relevant items. OneKeyAway introduces two interesting dimensions: a 64-question online questionnaire, which covers topics such as relationship expectations, emotional responsiveness, personal behaviors and habits, hobbies, sexual orientation and preferences, religion and substance; and a MatchLinC keyfob-like device that encodes those responses and is handed out at an event. Participants can "zap" each other - point their MatchLinCs at each other and press a button (vs. inserting a key in a lock), and a red, amber or green light on the device signals their relative compatibility. Couples can, of course, strike up a conversation whether the devices say they are compatible or incompatible (both of which are potentially interesting conversation topics if they find each other attractive). The real power is in the questionnaire, which primes the participants to delve into topic areas that are more likely to lead to progressive disclosure and increasing levels of intimacy.

I don't know whether music is one of the topics in the OneKeyAway questionnaire, but it does frequently rank among the topics that appears to be most conducive to enabling people to connect with and relate to each other. Summarizing a number of related psychological experiments, Sam observes that

music consistently trumps books, clothing, food, memories and television shows in helping people get to know each other.

Elsewhere in the book, he notes that

Web sites are extraordinarily good places to learn about people - perhaps the best of all places.

The book includes a handy table (shown right) to indicate just how well we can really learn about people's personality traits through different channels.

These, in turn, reminded me of some earlier ruminations about music and personality, that were inspired by earlier encounters with the work of Sam and his colleagues, and gives me renewed hope that we'll be able to effectively transmute Strands' early core competencies in music recommendation into broader and deeper recommendations that help people discover and enjoy other people, places and things around them (an explicit part of our mini-manifesto for Strands Labs, Seattle).

The sharing game, OneKeyAway and talking about music preferences can help people move from traits to personal concerns, but to really enable people to know each other at the deeper level of identity, McAdams says we have to set the stage for the telling of a story ... their story: "an inner story of the self that integrates the reconstructed past, perceived present and anticipated future to provide a life with unity, purpose and meaning". This dimension reminds me of my experience in The Mankind Project, where we regularly seek to differentiate data, judgments, feelings and wants. One of the tools we use to do this is careful use of language, or as we like to put it, clear, direct, concise and truthful (CDCT) communication. We often preface our remarks with "the story I make up about X" to help us remember that the judgments we have about people - others and ourselves - typically take the form of narratives we construct based on relatively sparse data, filled in with a multitude of judgments, in our relentless effort to make sense of the world. We also emphasize the use of "I" statements - which is consistent with the findings of James Pennebaker reported in the book that a person's use of first-person pronouns is correlated with honesty (and, interestingly, complex thinking).

Returning to the topic of making sense of people, Gosling reports that the famous Rorschach ink-blot test, in which people describe what they see in ink-blot patterns, is actually not very helpful in assessing personality. A more helpful test is the Picture Story Exercise (PSE) - or Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) - in which people make up a spontaneous story about a random series of pictures, revealing repressed aspects of their personality, especially their motivations and needs for achievement, affiliation and power. Personality seepage can also be effectively captured and analyzed through body movements such as jumping, walking and dancing. Wryly noting that "we sometimes say more with our hips than with our lips", Sam reports on a study by Karl Grammer, at the Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology, in which analysis of videotapes and interviews conducted in nightclubs showed that the tightness of a woman's clothing, the amount of skin it reveals, and the "explosiveness" of her movement on the dance floor are all correlated to estrogen levels (indicating fertility, and thus, attractiveness, evolutionarily speaking).

Of course, physiological components of attractiveness are often combined with - or covered up or compensated by - other, more deceptive, dimensions of the outer layers of appearance and behavior we project. This reminds me of some of Judith Donath's insights into the application of signaling theory to social networks, in which she distinguishes among the relative costs and benefits of handicap signals, index signals and conventional signals, and explores how fashion is largely a manifestation of the latter, relatively inexpensive, type of signal.

Fortunately, however, for those of us who are concerned or obsessed with authenticity, Sam claims that our behavioral residue is difficult to consciously manipulate, and underneath whatever appearances we may try to cultivate, our real personalities persistently try to express themselves. This is corroborated by experimental results from Self-Verification Theory, which suggests that people want to be seen as they really are (or at least as they see themselves), even if that means that "negative" aspects of their personalities are seen.

One of the more controversial chapters in the book addresses the issue of stereotypes. Given that we can only perceive narrow aspects of others' personalities, we naturally tend to fill in the gaps of the stories we make up about them with information based on our perceptions others who we judge similar, based on gender, race, or where they live (e.g., with respect to red states and blue states). Unfortunately, for those of politically correct persuasion, many of these stereotypes do have at least a kernel of truth. For example, women tend to score higher in the Big Five trait of neuroticism than men, i.e., they tend to be more anxious, less even-tempered, less laid-back, more emotional and more easily stressed tan men, and it turns out that, generally speaking, conservatives are "neurologically more resistant to change" and liberals are more extroverted.

And music stereotypes turn out to be very helpful in forming correct impressions of people, although not all music genres are created equal, with respect to the personality traits their fans inadvertently reveal. For example, affinity for Contemporary Religious music turns out to be much more revealing about personality, values and alcohol and drug use than a love of Soul music or, more surprisingly to me, Rap.

Another dimension that reveals aspects of our personalities is hoarding. Sam notes that we have "an ingrained instinct to collect stuff" (which may be why Amy Jo Kim includes "collections" as one of the five key elements of what makes online games - and online social networking - so addictive). He shares a definition of hoarding as "the repetitive collection of excessive quantities of poorly usable items of little or no value with failure to discard those items over time". With the caveat that "little or no value" is a rather subjective label, I must admit that I tend to hoard books, academic papers and wines. This, in turn, leads to a discussion of what our workspaces say about us ... but I'm going to hold off saying more about that (for now) ... I've been composing this blog in bits and pieces for over a month now, and I want to wrap it up (and if anyone has actually read this far, you may be thinking the same thing). [In fact, given the change in default formatting that TypePad has instituted in the interim, this blog post didn't even get assigned a usable URL, so I've had to repost it :-(]

However, before closing, I will note that in the "What Counts?" column of the May 2008 issue of Conscious Choice, a few interesting statistics - from a TreeHugger article on "Spring Cleaning: '101 Reasons to Get Rid Of It'" - are listed:

• 1.4 Million: Americans who suffer from hoarding or clutter.
• 80: Percentage of things Americans own that they never use.

Unfortunately, it's not clear what proportion of the 1.4 million sufferers are the actual hoarders and how many are family, friends and/or coworkers of the hoarders ... for example, I think my wife suffers much more from my hoarding than I do.

Just to come [nearly] full circle again, the issue starts out with a letter from the editor entitled Fire and Rain, that talks about the way that music influences us,

I can’t help but pay special attention to the songs that randomly pop into my head. ... Music has the magical ability to transport and transform us in ways that impress me on a daily basis.

I've just finished - and plan to write another long blog post about - another fabulous book: This is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel Levitin ... in which he talks about how and why some music gets stuck in our heads ... and a variety other aspects of our obsession with music ... and which offers an interesting complement to some of the insights that Sam shares in his book.

Returning to Sam's book, one issue that came up repeatedly (for me) throughout the book was the difference between what our words and actions really say about us, and how others generally interpret what our words and actions say about us. Sam notes a number of scientific experiments that have shown that we often make mistaken assumptions about people. But if most people make the same inferences - however mistaken - about others, won't this have an effect on their interactions with them ... and eventually, on their personalities? As Sam notes in the book:

Attractive people may be treated differently in social interaction, a phenomena that actually leads to differences in how they behave and how they seem themselves.

Theodor Adorno noted a similar phenomena in his 1951 book, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (which I read about in a recent Wall Street Journal book review, Capitalism and its Malcontent):

The sound of any woman's voice on the telephone tells us whether the speaker is attractive. It reflects back as self-confidence, natural ease and self-attention all the admiring and desirous glances she has ever received.

So if others' assumptions about us affects their behavior toward us, and their behavior affects our behavior, and our behavior over time affects our personalities, won't others' assumptions - however erroneous - affect our personalities? Do we tend to become more of the people others' see us as? I'm reminded of the lyrics from a Lyle Lovett song: "If I were the man that you wanted, I would not be the man that I am" ... but I digress...

I don't mean to say that personality and social psychology does not yield many interesting interesting insights - indeed, Sam's book is one of the most interesting books I've ever read - I just wonder how much impact these insights will have on society. How much does what our behavior really mean matter, in comparison to how others interpret our behavior (and its residue)? Should we be doing more scientific experiments or conducting more polls? Would we rather be right or happy (or popular)?

Of course, if snoopology catches on, perhaps more of us can be right, happy and popular - about and with each other.

Thingamajiggr II: Attentionality, Surreality and Sexuality

I attended Thingamajiggr, "a party celebrating the innovative Pacific Northwest tech community", last night. The party - organized by Waggle Labs and O'Reilly Radar, and held at the 911 Media Arts Center - was fun, and the presentations preceding the party - by John Medina, Scotto Moore, Dan Savage and others - were very engaging ... as were the presentations preceding the main presentations.

Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Radar) was MC for the event, and he started things off by introducing some of the organizers and sponsors of Thingamajiggr, a few people who plan to run workshops at BarCampSeattle this weekend, and other friends. Adrian MacDonald (911 Media Arts Center and Editor of On Screen Magazine) gave a whirlwind tour of the projects going on at the 911 Media Arts Center [Note to self: see if I can entice my kids to enroll in one or more of their youth programs.]

Brady then introduced Shelly Farnham (Co-Founder of Waggle Labs, and part-time consultant at Strands Labs Seattle) who gave us an overview of Pathable, a lightweight social networking tool for events where people are matched based on social tagging data that is printed on badges, which was being used at the party (and BarCampSeattle). Thingamajiggr attendees who preregistered could peel off their badge from the wall near the entrance (see left photo, with Shelly and Waggle Labs partner Peter Brown) and place it somewhere on their body - some placement sites offer better viewing than others, of course. The badges include attendees' names, title, affiliation, category, a few self-describing tags and a list of people who are "matches" and "opposites" (based on those tags and perhaps other profile information on the web registration form (see my badge, in the right photo). It's a great idea, but I do admit some nostalgia for the stamped round metal buttons they used last time I was a Pathable participant, at FOO Camp 2007.

We were then treated to a preview of the upcoming Seattle Power Tool Drag Race & Derby by Rusty Oliver and Jeremy Franklin Ross Divide of the HazardFactory. The event involves people reconfiguring power tools - some of which have been augmented with flame spewing attachments - to run on a race track. The videos of past events provide a much more effective sense of the chaotic fun than any words I could use to further describe it.

John Medina, author of Brain Rules, was the first of the headline speakers at the event. After making a wry observation about the brain having evolved to learn in outdoor environments, in near constant motion - and how most lecture halls (such as the one at 911 Media Arts Center), classrooms and office environments are thus antithetical to promoting learning - John focused our attention on what he called the attentional spotlight in the brain, and helped us understand why people don't pay attention to boring things (Rule #4). Demonstrating attention to attentionality, John frequently paused throughout his talk to ask us "Do I still have your attention?" - an unnecessary question, as he is an extremely engaging speaker.

The brain processes meaning before detail, and this meaning has evolved based on how the brain perceives the answers to three sets of questions:

• Can I eat it? Can it eat me? (tastes and threats)
• Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me? (sex)
• Have I seen it before? (pattern matching)

He then went on to claim that the attentional spotlight in the brain (Brodman Area 10) is sequential - it cannot truly multitask (i.e., process tasks in parallel). Although frequent task switching (which many of us call multitasking) appears to be increasingly the norm - for example, he average computer user has 17 windows at any given time (I currently have 25 open, but it's early on a Saturday morning) - it is not very effective, at least as it can be measured with respect to time to completion and error rates on tasks. In experiments comparing task switching to uninterrupted time on task, the time to completion of a task in the task switching condition is twice as long as in the uninterrupted condition, and results in 50% more errors.

Among the implications of these results are the dangers in using mobile phones while driving. John presented a chart - shown on the right - comparing the mean response time (MRT) of people under three conditions: normal, legally drunk (blood alcohol content of 0.08) and talking on a mobile phone (while sober). The chart shows that the MRT for a sober person talking on a mobile phone is considerably longer than for a person who is drunk. This is because when you talk with someone on the phone, you are visualizing them, in the same way as you visualize characters and scenes in a book by Faulkner or Tolkien (for example). Thus, your attentional spotlight is drawn away from your real world activity (e.g., driving) and into an imaginary world ... and this happens whether your mobile phone is in your hands or not (i.e., "hands-free" use of mobile phones). [I imagine that listening to audiobooks while driving would be just as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, talking on a mobile phone while driving ... so perhaps we'll see some laws prohibiting this combination of activities in the near future.] John noted that talking with someone on a mobile phlone is qualitatively different from talking to someone next to you in the car, because in the latter case your brain does not have to visualize or imagine your conversation partner - they are part of the real world scene. It is also different from listening to music ... except when listening to really good music - what I like to call "goosebump music", but which John referred to even more evocatively as delivering a dopamine lollipop - that has strong personal meaning to (and effect on) you ... so perhaps we'll see prohibitions against listening to meaningful music while driving, too. Personally, I think that the most dangerous driving situation is a parent with small, unruly children in the back seat, so if we really want to make our roads safer, we ought to prohibit that as well ... but I digress (do I still have your attention?).

I'll wrap up this section by noting that in thanking John after his talk, Brady noted that his book was published by Pear Press, which walks the talk of uninterrupted task focus by publishing and promoting only one book per year (!).

Scotto Moore was next up, presenting Intangible Method, A Digital Fairy Tale [Scotto's talk held my attention so effectively that I never even thought to take a photo, so I'll insert an image from his web site.]. The fictional story - created in the summer of 2006, and set in the summer of 2008 - is about a woman, known only as sarah-in-motion, who's everyday activities are captured and posted to the web ... by someone referred to as IntangibleMethod. This starts off with a daily series of YouTube videos on "sarah's walk to work", each of which generates tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments. The videos eventually move off the street and into her home with a series "sarah around the house". After she is BoingBoinged, she becomes totally immersed in the online postings of and about her, and things start changing for the worse, leading to her losing her job, her house, and eventually prompting a series of darker videos: "sarah sleeps in park", "sarah looks for change", "sarah spots new doorway". The ending brings the plot full circle again, with a provocative note from sarah-in-motion: ""my body was just an avatar. see you in second life." Scotto finished off promoting his upcoming play, Interlaced Falling Star, epic science fiction told on a budget of under $300, showing at the Annex Theatre from July 25 - August 23.

Dan Savage, author of the Savage Love column and blog (or slog), rounded out the evening presentations. Brady didn't remember the exact title of Dan's column during his introduction, and so Dan reminded him (and us) several times during the presentation that he has been writing this column for 17 years (or, as he frequently directed the reminder toward Brady, "longer than you've had pubic hair").

Dan led off by telling us that he sees his job (if not his mission) as "abstinence reprogramming" for college students, trying to undo the damage wrought by $1.2B in federal government funding during the Bush administration for sex education programs that promote ignorance as a virtue and amount to nothing more than "reproductive biology". He likened the way we typically teach sex education in our schools to driver's education that teaches students how a car's internal combustion engine works, rather than informing them about turn signals, traffic signs, how to avoid accidents and other rules of the road.

If John Medina's refrain was "Do I still have your attention?", Dan's refrain was "Any other questions?" After his introductory remarks, he spent the rest of his time in a question and answer session with the audience of about 100 people.

Responding to a question about how the Internet had affected the newspaper column profession, Dan complained that the web, and weblogs in particular, "ruined a sweet deal" for newspaper columnists: he used to get by working for two days, scrambling over the weekend to get the paper out, and then spend three days getting high and watching movies (telling his editors that he was trolling for materials). The news cycle is no longer weekly (as at The Stranger), daily or even hourly, but momently. And with the advent of web 2.0, it's no longer enough to simply write blog entries, with podcasting, everyone has to be a radio station, and with YouTube, everyone has to be a TV station.

However, there have been some advantages. Before the Internet, he was frequently asked for referrals or define terms - both of which are now easily accessible to anyone with a web browser. He also used to receive long, flowery descriptive letters of various genital sores, now he gets digital photos of them in email ... from people who are, ironically, too embarrassed to go see a doctor about treatment. He may turn these photos into a flipbook ... although there have been some drawbacks to these emails, as he related a funny story about a time when one popped up unexpectedly when he was on an airplane flight, and a woman called out ("Oh my god, he's masturbating!").

A somewhat less ambivalent advantage to the Internet is that it promotes his goal of deprogramming ignorance- abstinence-based sex education: as he puts it, "the web is sex education in America" (reminding me of Avenue Q's song, "The Internet is for Porn" ... which further reminds me, the show is playing at The Paramount Theatre right now). Now we just need to carry the message to the streets - Dan suggested putting up advertisements for the Scarlet Teen web site ("sex ed for the real world") on middle school buses.

Interestingly, despite his promotion of openness, he reported that his son has never seen a computer, a copy of The Stranger or the book Dan wrote about adopting him, "The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant", despite the fact that many other kids his age have cable TV in their bedrooms. When people started clapping, he counseled "Don’t be smug Seattle applauders".

Dan also shared a funny story about an interview he conducted with a man who married his horse on his Savage Love Radio. At the end of the interview, he asked, "Are you married to a boy horse or a girl horse?" Drawing himself up rather huffily, the man replied, “I am not a homosexual!” ... even people who practice bestiality have to draw the line somewhere, I guess.

All in all, it was a great set of talks, and although I didn't stay long afterward, many of the people in the audience - seemed just as interesting as those presenting at the front of the room. I'm sad I am missing BarCampSeattle this weekend, as I'm sure many of these people will be leading sessions at the unconference, but I'm glad that I at least got o enjoy a little taste of the local tech community at Thingamajiggr!

UbiComp 2008 Workshops

We are happy to announce 9 workshops that will be held at UbiComp 2008, the Tenth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, in Seoul, South Korea, on September 21, the day before the main conference program, which will take place September 22-24.

Workshops provide an excellent opportunity to discuss and explore emerging areas of ubiquitous computing research with a group of like-minded researchers and practitioners. The workshops at UbiComp 2008 cover many interesting and exciting aspects of ubiquitous computing, including devices and perception, evaluation, vehicular computing, design and integration principles, ubiquitous network islands, ambient information systems, ubiquitous sustainability, automated journeys and intelligent work environments. The goal of the workshops is to share understandings and experiences, to foster the development of research communities, to learn from each other and to envision future directions.

The submission deadline for workshop position papers is Friday, June 27, 2008. All workshops will be held on Sunday, September 21st. More information about workshops is included below, and is also available on the workshops web site (http://ubicomp.org/ubicomp2008/workshops.shtml).

We also want to note that there are a number of other, previously announced tracks in the conference that are still open to participation (until June 27):

• Panels
• Demonstrations
• Interactive Posters
• Videos
• Doctoral Colloquium
• Student Volunteers

More information about the conference - including these participation categories - can be found at the conference web site (http://ubicomp.org/ubicomp2008/).

W1. Devices that Alter Perception (DAP 2008)

Sensors, actuators, implants, wearable computers, and neural interfaces can do more than simply observe our bodies; these devices can alter and manipulate our perceptions. This workshop will promote design and critique of systems with the explicit intent of altering the human percepts. Participants will be asked to present position papers or demonstrations concerning devices that act on phenomena related to the process of perception. The goals of the workshop are to: (1) better understand the process of perception (2) aid those developing devices by sharing designs (3) debate of ethical and social issues that are unique to devices that operate below or upon awareness.

W2. Ubiquitous Systems Evaluation (USE '08)

USE '08 aims to bring together practitioners from a wide range of disciplines to discuss best practice and challenges in the evaluation of ubiquitous systems. Recognised evaluation strategies are essential in order that the contribution of new techniques can be quantified objectively. Experience has shown that evaluating ubiquitous systems is extremely difficult; approaches tend to be subjective, piecemeal or both. Individual approaches to evaluation risk being incomplete and comparisons between systems can be difficult.

W3. Ubiquitous Inter- and Intra-Vehicular Computing (UIIVC 2008)

Modern vehicles have a high number of intra-vehicle communication systems and buses connecting hundreds of sensors, delivering information at high data rates. As such, the sensor density in modern cars makes them an interesting ubiquitous computing environment. Besides mobile phones, modern vehicles are the most ubiquitous and most widely deployed mobile sensor node systems. The idea of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication is to interconnect these sensor-equipped vehicles to collaboratively share a subset of this information. This enables novel types of applications in the areas such as safety, traffic efficiency and comfort. V2x communication poses many research challenges on applications, communication technologies such as IEEE 802.11p WLAN and cellular networks, networked sensing systems, privacy, security and other research fields relevant to ubiquitous computing. Workshop topics will address research from all these domains in a vehicular environment.

W4. 2nd International Workshop on Design and Integration Principles for Smart Objects (DIPSO 2008)

Tagging everyday objects with sensors, actuators and building an instrumented environment are recent practices in industry and academia. In fact, the smart object domain has matured over the years. The combination of Internet and technologies like near field communications, real time localization, sensor networking etc. are bringing smart objects into commercial use. Several successful prototypes and applications have already demonstrated and deployed. However, the lack of commonality among the design principles and the underlying infrastructures of these projects is hindering the exciting future of smart object systems. We believe the primary reason behind this phenomenon is one missing rationale for the design and integration of smart objects. Now it is the time to focus on current practices and align on some key issues to continue the rapid progress of smart objects. DIPSO 2008 seeks to follow the earlier DIPSO workshop, co-located with Ubicomp 2007 and will look at the existing smart object systems to extract and extrapolate the best practices to rationalize the design and integration principles for smart objects.

W5. Connecting Ubiquitous Islands using Mobile and Next Generation Networks

This workshop will discuss the topic of connecting islands of ubiquitous computing technology using wide-area networks, and how the requirements from the services operating in those islands impact the network technology and systems. This workshop will discuss what it would take to leverage existing networks together with emerging services to create truly ubiquitous connectivity.

W6. Ambient Information Systems

Ambient Information Systems describe a large set of applications that publish information in a highly non-intrusive manner, following on from Mark Weiser's concept of calm technology. Building on the success of AIS2007 at Pervasive 2007, this workshop will bring together researchers working in the areas of ambient displays, peripheral displays, slow technology, glanceable displays, and calm technology, to discuss and collaborate on developing new design approaches for creating ambient information systems. We are calling for paper submissions describing early-stage and mature research on Ambient Information Systems and for demonstrators across the spectrum from technology to art and design.

W7. Ubiquitous Sustainability: Citizen Science & Activism

In this workshop we want to explore new approaches to bring about real environmental change by looking at the success of empowering technologies that enable grassroots activism and bottom up community participation. Ubiquitous computing is transforming from being mostly about professional communication and social interaction to a sensor rich personal measurement platform that can empower individuals and groups to gain an awareness of their surroundings, engage in grassroots activism to promote environmental change, and enable a new social paradigm - citizen science. This workshop brings together fresh ideas and approaches to help elevate individuals to have a powerful voice in society, to act as citizen scientists, and collectively learn and lobby for change worldwide.

W8. Automated Journeys

Computing technology now pervades those moments of our day when we move through our cities. Mobile phones, music players, vending machines, contact-less payment systems and RFID-enabled turnstiles are de rigueur on our daily journeys. This workshop aims to examine these augmented journeys, to reflect on the public, semi-public and private technologies available to us in them, and to speculate on what innovations might be to come. Taking as our starting point cities such as Seoul, we aim to take seriously the developments in mobile technology as well as the advancements in autonomous machinery and how these mesh with our urban journeys. Through collaborative fieldwork, group discussion and a hands-on design brainstorming session, the workshop's empirical focus will be directed towards producing 4 envisagements that either speculate and/or critically reflect on technological futures.

W9. UbiWORK: Design and Evaluation of Smart Environments in the Workplace

This workshop is the fourth in a series of UbiComp workshops on smart environment technologies and applications for the workplace. It offers a unique window into the state of the art through the participation of a range of researchers, designers and builders who exchange both basic research and real-world case experiences; and invites participants to share ideas about them. This year we focus on understanding appropriate design processes and creating valid evaluation metrics for smart environments (a recurrent request from previous workshop participants). What design processes allow integration of new ubicomp-style systems with existing technologies in a room that is in daily use? What evaluation methods and metrics give us an accurate picture, and how can that information best be applied in an iterative design process?

The Challenges of Location-Based Social Networking

Meetro, the location-aware instant messaging application - and company - has failed (or as my entrepreneur friends often like to say in such cases, it has "run out of runway"). Peter sent me a link to an inspiring TechCrunch guest post by Paul Bragiel, Meetro's founder, in which Paul has courageously shared the lessons he and his colleagues learned from this effort. Having failed - or run out of runway - in my own startup a few years ago, I don't see failure as any kind of stigma, and am glad that Paul doesn't either.

As someone who has been working for many years on ways to effectively bridge the gaps between the richness of our online lives (including our online social networks) and the physical spaces we share with others, I am saddened by the demise of Meetro. Paul and I exchanged some emails shortly after I wrote a blog post about Meetro's proximity-based instant messaging application in June 2005. I was excited for him and his team when they moved from Chicago to Palo Alto shortly thereafter, as their prospects seemed bright. However, I was also concerned about whether Meetro would ultimately succeed where Trepia had failed.

Paul hits the nail on the head in identifying the location problem (or the problem of constructing bridges between physical spaces and online communities):

Most importantly, there was a “location problem”. It’s really hard to grow a product that’s 100% focused on where you physically are. Tons of companies have tried this before and most of them have died. We, of course, were cocky and had to give it a try. There was just something so sexy about the idea that you could load up a piece of software and it would tell you about someone nearby who was interesting to you. Someone will crack this and make billions of dollars on it. I can only hope to be involved in some shape or form, since it’s an itch that hasn’t gone away for me.

He goes on to propose some scenarios or trajectories in which location-based social networking applications might succeed:

• As extensions of existing social networks with large numbers of members (e.g., MySpace, Facebook), to help overcome what we might call the critical mass problem. The privacy issues in going physical (or locational) are significant, but as danah has previously pointed out, Facebook does not seem averse to taking risks with users' privacy.
• Extending the service city by city, as Yelp has done. However, Yelp has not gone physical (yet), and so can scale more easily as an online service (with physical world referents). I don't know how many users they have, but they still may be shy of the critical masses needed to succeed with a physical location-based component.

Paul highlights the download problem: any application that requires any kind of download in order to run (vs., say, simply allowing a user to visit a web site) has a huge initial - one might say "inertial" - barrier to entry. As he notes:

... the dropoff that happened once people had to download and install Meetro was HUGE and didn’t help us at all. If I recall, it was something in the 80 to 90% range. It crushed adoption rates.

The Nokia Sensor application, which uses Bluetooth to enable proximity-based social networking via mobile phones (and which has one of the coolest Flash-based use-case scenario depictions I've ever seen), also suffered from the download problem - exacerbated by the fact that far fewer people are (or were) willing to download applications onto their phones than onto their laptop or desktop computers. I read somewhere that the application had been downloaded a million times - I'm not sure how many users that represents, nor how many downloads resulted in successful installs.

However, there was a bigger problem: searching for references to Sensor on blogs, forums and other social media sites just before I interviewed with Nokia in the summer of 2006 revealed that most people who talked about using Sensor reported that they never "saw" anyone else running Sensor, other than friends they were already with.

This is an example of another challenge that Meetro encountered, what Paul calls the "realtime" problem: the requirement that users of the system (Meetro or Sensor) be in synchronous proximity of each other, i.e., in the same place at the same time. My friend and former intern, Sean Savage, attempted to address this problem with PlaceSite (which also now appears to be defunct), a place-based, vs. proximity-based, social networking application in which there was some notion of asynchrony - who has been here recently, in addition to who is here (or near) now? Apparently, Meetro [eventually] incorporated some kind of asynchrony into their app:

I can still feel the magic of when I was on layover in the Denver Airport, I met one of our users, and we grabbed a beer. This is what I dreamed Meetro would be about all the time, but those moments were too few and far between. We did fix this in the end but it was too little too late. So, to anyone tackling this problem in the future, make sure you have some type of persistence built-in, be it “people here previously” or “most common visitors to the area” etc.

Paul proposes three promising avenues for future location-based social networking applications:

• Wait until the mobile / wireless operators have solved the location problem ... but after my experience working with Nokia, I know that building upon a carrier solution would require that carriers open up their location capabilities ... which would require a shift of policy and perspective that would be far more significant than the technology shift (for many carriers)
• Create an API to enable the application to work off of / in conjunction with another, more broadly adopted application (like AIM or Skype).
• Create an application that allows you to explicitly "check-in" with your location, like Dodgeball or Swarm ... but the requirement of an explicit action (sending a text message), vs. simply showing up, and opening up your laptop or waking up your phone, undermines the more natural, or at least implicit, awareness and interaction envisioned by Meetro (and all of the proactive display applications in which I've been involved).

One of the things I didn't quite understand when I first blogged about Meetro was how they managed their location-awareness. I was particularly curious, as many of my former colleagues at Intel Research Seattle were working on the PlaceLab project, creating a WiFi-based, privacy-preserving, location-aware infrastructure to support [Meetro-like] applications ... with the idea that "if you build it [the infrastructure], they will come [applications and users]". Paul shared some details in his post (and, as I suspected, it was closely related to PlaceLab):

When you launched Meetro we would scan for all the WiFi networks out there. We would then crosscheck what was out there with what we had in a huge global database (it had grown to 4+ million hotspots when we stopped). If it was in the database, then we would do some trilateration to figure out where you were. If not, we would ask you to enter your location. We would save this info and use it later to crosscheck and verify it against similar data.

However, as is clear from the lessons shared by Paul, the technology itself - the application and the infrastructure it uses - is only part of the puzzle. A number of other elements have to align in order to build a successful location-based social networking application.

Like Paul, I still believe there is great promise in this area, and I am grateful for his sharing the wisdom he has gained in efforts to fulfill this promise!

What Would Your Toaster Say to Your TV?

The recent announcement of the Sprint / Clearwire WiMax venture generated a great deal of excitement in many quarters. In an Advertising Age article,  "WiMax Could Bring Dramatic Changes, Wherever You Are", Abbey Klaussen writes:

WiMax is essentially the network that will deliver data and voice services to phones, but much faster than what consumers are used to using. It would turn the country into a giant hot spot -- in theory, at least. It's often referred to as a fourth-generation wireless service -- or 4G -- as it will be able to deliver quicker mobile-internet service than the 3G services offered by many carriers. (The first two generations of cellular service were analog and digital.) The venture's WiMax service should cover 120 million to 140 million people by 2010, said executives, who initially will concentrate deployment in the top 100 markets.

In a Chicago Tribune article (also distributed by the Seattle Times) earlier this week, "WiMax deal could lead to universal connectivity", Wallin Wong writes:

Sprint's WiMax network is designed to transmit data at speeds comparable to mid- and high-tier cable broadband — far faster than what's available for wireless Web surfing. This means using the Internet on a WiMax-enabled mobile phone, for example, will be just as speedy as home Internet connections.

It's also a big leap over today's Wi-Fi hot spots, which typically provide laptop users with Internet access in a cafe or airport. Because the coverage will stretch across metropolitan areas, a user would be able to listen to Internet radio in a WiMax-equipped car while speeding down the highway.

These all sound like promising new capabilities that will lead to useful applications - or extensions of existing applications - that may enrich our lives. However, these same articles also include some speculation that exhibit a perspective that I would call technology in search of a problem.

The Chicago Tribune article also includes the following:

By year's end, it's expected that the next generation of wireless networks will be launched, blanketing initial service areas with a fast Internet signal — accessible to subscribers from homes, streets and traveling vehicles — and capable of giving mundane home appliances a voice.

In this Jetsonian vision of life, which could take several years to arrive fully, a washing machine embedded with a wireless chip would detect a problem and contact the manufacturer even before the homeowner knew something was wrong with the spin cycle.

And the Advertising Age article has similarly oriented prognostications:

WiMax sounds like something Neo would use to communicate back to Morpheus in "The Matrix." In reality, it could bring a decidedly sci-fi experience to everyday living. And thanks to a group of high-profile backers, the fledgling technology is coming to life again.
...
And here comes the sci-fi-inspired part: the technology, said Mr. Bader [Eric Bader, partner in Brand in Hand], won't necessarily be confined to mobile phone devices, but could infiltrate ordinary household items: "toasters, TVs and car keys. It's the beginning of truly connected appliances. ... It gives us a canvas on which to start to converge."

Sigh.

Leaving aside the question of whether WiMax is the right standard, I'm all for the general idea of universal connectivity, but only from a human-centered design perspective. I believe that the world will be a better place when people can all connect more effectively to the other people, places and things around us (indeed, this is one of the key pillars of the mini-manifesto for Strands Labs, Seattle).

All this talk about giving home appliances a voice, and imbuing toasters with connectivity may strike some people as sci-fi, but to me it smacks of technology-centered design. Maybe I've been blessed with reliable appliances, but I've never once thought "I sure wish my washing machine could call out for parts automatically". And if my toaster was "on the grid", well, what would it want to say to my TV (or any of my other appliances)?

Although at times I feel a certain amount of frustration with this pervasive "technology for the technology's sake" perspective, I do like to have fun with it from time to time. A few years ago, I drafted a proposal for 12 steps for technology-centered designers. And a few years earlier, as my research focus was shifting from Artificial Intelligence to Ubiquitous Computing, Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work Whatever, I first discovered the Internet Toaster.

At first, I thought the Internet Toaster was a hoax, but further research suggests that it was true. Here's what they have to say about this at The Living Internet:

There really was an Internet toaster. Dan Lynch, President of the Interop Internet networking show, told John Romkey at the 1989 show that he would give him star billing the following year if he connected a toaster to the Internet. Who could have resisted a challenge like that?

Working together with his friend Simon Hackett,John Romkey rose to the occasion and connected a Sunbeam Deluxe Automatic Radiant Control Toaster to the Internet, becoming the hit of the 1990 Interop. A pictureof Hackett demonstrating the toaster is shown below.

http://www.internode.on.net/images/toaster2.jpg

The toaster was connected to the Internet with TCP/IP networking, and controlled with a Simple Networking Management Protocol Management Information Base (SNMP MIB). It had one control, to turn the power on, and the darkness of the toast was controlled by how long the power was kept on.

However, a human being still had to insert the bread. At the 1991 Interop a small robotic crane was added to the system, also controlled from the Internet, which picked up a slice of bread and dropped it into the toaster, automating the system from end-to-end.

[I'm including a photo of what I believe is the 1991 version that I found a while back, but cannot remember the source - perhaps it's from the broken "toaster2.jpg" link above.]

I thought this was fascinating, and so I did some more research, discovering an article in The Register on the Internet Weather Toaster, which was a senior project by industrial design student Robin Southgate, at Brune University:

According to a British Council Design Lab description:

How does it work? The innocuous kitchen staple secretly houses some sleek, smart communications technology. A modem inside the toaster dials to a server using a freephone number, which then accesses the Met Office website, where it retrieves the information it needs and translates it into a simple single number ' 1, 2 or 3. Each number corresponds to the weather symbols for cloud, sun and rain.

The symbol is then branded onto the bread in the toaster using a heat-resistant stencil which is interposed between the bread and the heating element for the final 20-odd seconds of toasting ' so you can still have your toast the way you like it.

Joe Klinger took toasters to the next level, technologically speaking, in his creation of ToAsTOr, the Toaster PC:

I wanted to make a small quiet computer for use as an MP3 server, DVD player, surfing, and occasional gaming. I also wanted it to be small enough to fit in a bag so that I could take it to friend's houses or to work. When I set out to build this bread and butter computer ;-) I found the Mini-ITX form factor motherboards. I wanted to build something unique. I thought I would go to the antique stores and find something cool to rebuild as a computer. I wanted something built out of metal for RFI and EMI shielding.

I thought that a toaster would be cool and have the DVD/CDRW open out of the toast slot. The problem is that all of the toasters were too small to use a full size hard drive, video card, LCD, etc... Then I found a large toaster (1960 General Electric) with a sizeable crumb tray/warmer. This monster toaster used 1200 watts! So, I had to open a business account to buy the EPIA motherboard at the only place in Atlanta that has them. I then took it to the antique store to determine if it would fit. It would fit but only if the mobo was about an inch off the crumb tray. When I went to purchase the toaster the salesman mentioned something about whether or not it worked. I told him that it did not matter I was going to toss the inner workings and make something crazy. I pulled out the motherboard and he said, "You are going to make it into a robot?" I snickered and said, "no, only a computer!" I have skills, but damn - a robot? :-) I never tried it to see if it still worked as a toaster.

These connected toasters are, indeed, interesting curiosities. Maybe WiMax will encourage more development - and perhaps even adoption - of appliances that can talk to each other. I hope, though, that increasing connectivity - provided by WiMax and/or other standards - will offer more substantial capabilities to enrich our lives in more meaningful ways.

We'll certainly be doing our part to contribute to that effort.

Recommender Systems in Retail Stores: Bridging the Gaps between eCommerce and Physical Shopping

Advertising Age posted an article yesterday on Olay Translates Killer Online App to Retail Aisles, describing some recent trial deployments of special kiosks in physical stores that give shoppers access to online recommender systems. These systems have access to online representations of offline inventories - or, at least, product lines typically carried - in the stores, and help bring some of the advantages of electronic commerce (e.g., more detailed information and personalized recommendations on products) to bricks and mortar stores.

Shoppers - online and offline - often suffer from the paradox of choice: a range of options so vast that it can feel overwhelming (e.g., the "250 varieties of cookies, 75 iced teas, 230 soups, 175 salad dressings, 275 cereals and 40 toothpastes" that Barry Schwartz mentions in his TED presentation on the topic) and result in low customer satisfaction, regardless of which option is selected. Recommender systems help people navigate broad ranges of options in the digital world, but without the assistance of a salesperson, there has been little help for shoppers in physical stores ... until recently.

For the growing number of consumers who prefer the online experience to traditional shopping, the ease of finding products and getting recommendations clearly is a draw, said Carter Cast. Mr. Cast, a former CEO of Walmart.com and head of strategy for Wal-Mart Stores in the U.S., became CEO of fledgling specialty online retailer Netshops late last year.

Because of expectations created by web shopping, consumers increasingly expect offline stores to have the goods they want and make them easy to find, Mr. Cast said. "So the ante is raised in the physical world."

In an effort to meet these expectations, Procter & Gamble has developed and deployed a version of their popular Olay For You online recommender system (tag line: "a little about Olay, a lot about you") that bridges the gap between the wealth of online personalized information and the experience of customers in offline WalMart stores. In either case - visiting the web site or at a WalMart kiosk - users characterize their general wants and needs, selecting from among options such as

• I want to see a visible improvement in my skin
• I'm happy with my skin but want to help it be the best it can be
• I want to look good for a special occasion
• I want to keep up with the latest skin care products

and then progressively reveal more specifics about themselves (e.g., their age, their skin type and color, whether they are experiencing hormonal changes, and other lifestyle issues such as "not enough 'me' time"), until the system recommends a skin care product that is deemed likely to be right for them. Screenshots of my profile and recommended Olay products can be seen below.

The strictly online version offers the capability of optionally remembering the user's profile (associated with their email address); it's not clear from the article whether or how the kiosk version, designed by Talk Me Into It ("GPS for the overwhelmed buyer") allows this, nor whether it allows offline shoppers to access their previously created online profiles at the kiosks, nor even whether the system has real-time access to the store's inventory. And, of course, it remains to be seen how willing customers will be to reveal some of the personal details the online recommender system asks when they are interacting with the system in a public setting like a retail store aisle.

Another system mentioned in the article is the Search Engine in the Store^TM developed by Evincii. The description of the system on Evincii's web site articulates a rather comprehensive value roposition:

Evincii's in-store search engine recommends precise and relevant products to consumers in brick-and-mortar and online stores. Our network delivers an interactive, targeted, search-based platform at the point of decision with proven, category-wide and brand-specific sales lift. Shoppers receive personalized advice in seconds. Retailers get happy customers, improved sales efficiency, and increased margins. Product manufacturers get the opportunity to present their products to individual shoppers just before the point of purchase.

According to the article, one Evincii kiosk system, which I believe is [cleverly] named "PharmAssist", has been deployed in Longs Drugs stores in California (Evincii is headquartered in Mountain View) since 2006, and includes targeted advertising as part of their search capability:

Johnson & Johnson is an initial advertiser on the system, which allows advertisers to place ads similar to online display ads, including video, around search results.

But like Google or other search engines, Evincii looks to return "organic" results only based on the criteria shoppers input, such as their symptoms, said Charles Koo, CEO of the private-equity-backed venture. Then, once they've selected a product, the kiosk helps them locate it on the shelf.

I don't know anything about the full range of advertising available for inclusion with "organic" search results, but I find myself musing about how Longs' customers might respond to video advertisements for  "sensitive" products such as Trojan condoms or Ex-lax ... especially if the advertisements include an audio component. The AdAge article also expresses some skepticism.

Mr. Koo, however, said Evincii's research at Longs indicates that 15% to 18% of visitors to OTC-drug departments use the kiosks, numbers similar to those that ComScore found last year of consumers who use online search to research package goods. Stores using the kiosks, he said, had category sales lifts of 3% to 6%.

My observations and judgments are markedly different from those shared by Evincii. Although I don't recall visiting a Longs Drugs store in California during the last two years, I'm reminded of how annoying I found a kiosk deployed at another drug store - I think it was a Walgreens - on El Camino Real in Palo Alto. Whenever anyone got near, the kiosk would loudly offer "Can I help you find something?". While I was there waiting for a prescription to be filled, about a year ago, I informally observed the kiosk for about 15 minutes - from a safe distance - and while I heard the audio offer of assistance at least a dozen times, no one stopped to take advantage of the offer and interact with the kiosk ... and I wondered how many other customers, like me, avoided that section of the aisle like the plague.

Despite having some reservations about some of the examples reported in the AdAge article, I do think that bridging the gaps between online [commerce] and offline [shopping] holds great promise in general. The art - and science - is to design the bridges in a way that offers compelling value to all stakeholders, and to situate them in the kinds of spaces where that value can best be realized.

[Update, 2008-06-05]

I received an email from a reader with more information about the OlayForYou system and the kiosks deployed in stores. The reader would prefer not to be identified, but is willing to permit me to share the information from the email:

• The OlayForYou system does not track behavior over time, a key feature of many recommender systems.
• The system was designed around the concept of "buy soon" - rather than "buy now" -  a shopping list you could cross off one item at a time as your budget allowed.
  
• The kiosks used Rivet Digital Touch Screens and were deployed in WalMart stores. The reader was not sure where, how many or whether they are still in use. The kiosks do not have network connectivity, and so have no access to personal profiles or real-time inventory.
• The kiosk questions are simpler than those on the web site, due to time and privacy constraints of in-store use.

Many thanks to the reader who offered the additional information!

Do YouJustGetMe? Do I Even Get Myself?

David Evans presented a paper at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2008) this week on the science of interpersonal perception, or more specifically: how well people are able to understand (or "get") others based on others' online profiles, and what elements of those profiles are most important to that understanding.

The results presented in the paper, "What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality Impressions?", are based on data collected through an online site, YouJustGetMe, that invites users to answer a set of 40 questions designed to enable assessment of their personality - based on the "big five" personality traits, which, according to Wikipedia, include the following:

• Openness - appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience.

• Conscientiousness - a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.

• Extraversion - energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others.

• Agreeableness - a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.

• Neuroticism - a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability

The research questions that David and his co-authors, Sam Gosling and Anthony Carroll, posed were:

Are people getting to know each other via social media? Are they at least seeing others as the others see themselves? Under what conditions?

The YouJustGetMe web site was designed to answer these questions. The site enables users to conduct a personality self-assessment (i.e., answer the 40 questions for themselves), create a profile of themselves based primarily on things they love or hate (33 pre-defined fields), and assess (guess) others' personalities - answering the 40 questions as they would apply to the "target" person - based on the target person's profile. The self-assessments are then compared to assessments by others to measure the impression agreement. They also created a YouJustGetMe Facebook application to enable the same kind of experiences within a specific, and popular, social networking website (which they acronymize as SNW). In both contexts - the YJGM and FB sites - users who created profiles could invite friends or family  to provide assessments of them, and/or they could enable other random users to provide assessments of them.

The findings, in a nutshell, are:

• People get each other
  SNW profile owners are generally seen by others as they see themselves (i.e. impression agreement was substantial)
• People on Facebook get each other
  Impression agreement was associated with context (agreement was stronger on the basis of Facebook profiles than on YouJustGetMe profiles)
• Women are better guessers and easier to guess than men (random assignment)
  within the context in which raters were judging unknown targets (i.e., YouJustGetMe profiles), women were better raters than men and were rated with higher levels of agreement than men
• Some profile elements provide better clues than others
  several specific elements of the profiles were associated with increased or diminished levels of impression agreement.

The first two results are not terribly surprising to me. The first finding is consistent with other studies that suggest dating profiles are pretty accurate, e.g., Nicole Elison's presentation on "Deceptive Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles" at the recent Communities and Technologies conference (C&T 2007). I don't mean to imply that Facebook is a dating site, but like online dating sites, I believe most Facebook users know, want to know, or might come into physical contact with (or at least proximity of), each other. The second is consistent with other papers presented at this conference (e.g., the two papers presented by Kristin Stecher and Scott Counts - which I hope to blog about, along with other presentations at the conference, sometime soon) and other conferences (e.g., papers presented by Cliff Lampe and Scott Golder at CHI 2007 ... for which I just realized I never finished / posted my blog summary) that provide evidence for the efficacy of Facebook features in conveying information.

The third result is interesting, as it brings to mind some of the ideas that Louann Brizendine writes about in her book, The Female Brain, regarding the evolutionary biological basis for women's keener perceptual abilities:

If you can read faces and voices, you can tell what an infant needs. You can predict what a bigger, more aggressive male is going to do. And since you're smaller, you probably need to band with other females to fend off attacks from a ticked off caveman - or cavemen.

She also writes about how and why women - and girls - are far more keenly aware of their own appearance than men (or boys), which I suspect would lead to higher agreement between the image they want to project and the image that is perceived by others. [Aside: the last time I wrote about The Female Brain - in the context of Content-Centered Conversations (regarding teen use of social media) - a