Going to School on a Robot: Robot and User Interface Design Features That Matter.

Telepresence robots have recently been introduced as a way for children who are homebound due to medical conditions to attend their local schools. These robots provide an experience that is a much richer learning experience than the typical home instruction services of 4-5 hours a week. Because the robots on the market today were designed for use by adults in work settings, they do not necessarily fit children in school settings. We carried out a study of 19 homebound students, interviewing and observing them as well as interviewing their parents, teachers, administrators, and classmates. We organized our findings along the lines of the various tasks and settings the child is in, developing a learner-centered analytic framework, then teacher-, classmate-, and homebound-controller-centered analytic frameworks. Although some features of current robots fit children in school settings, we discovered a number of cases where there was a mismatch or additional features are needed. Our findings are described according to analytic frames that capture user experiences. Based on these user-centered findings, we provide recommendations for designing the robot and user interface to better fit children using robots for school and learning activities.

Ramsey-Bordé Matter-Wave Interferometry for Laser Frequency Stabilization at 10

We demonstrate Ramsey-Bordé (RB) atom interferometry for high performance laser stabilization with fractional frequency instability <2×10^{-16} for timescales between 10 and 1000s. The RB spectroscopy laser interrogates two counterpropagating ^{40}Ca beams on the ^{1}S_{0}-^{3}P_{1} transition at 657 nm, yielding 1.6 kHz linewidth interference fringes. Fluorescence detection of the excited state population is performed on the (4s4p) ^{3}P_{1}-(4p^{2}) ^{3}P_{0} transition at 431 nm. Minimal thermal shielding and no vibration isolation are used. These stability results surpass performance from other thermal atomic or molecular systems by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude, and further improvements look feasible.

Improving the Odds Through the Collaboration Success Wizard.

Collaboration has become a dominant mode of scientific inquiry, and good collaborative processes are important for ensuring scientific quality and productivity. Often the participants in these collaborations are not collocated, yet distance introduces challenges. There remains a need for evaluative tools that can identify potential collaboration problems early and provide strategies for managing and addressing collaboration issues. This paper introduces a new research and diagnostic tool, the Collaboration Success Wizard (CSW), and provides two case studies of its use in evaluating ongoing collaborative projects in the health sciences. The CSW is designed both to validate and refine existing theory about the factors that encourage successful collaboration and to promote good collaborative practices in geographically distributed team-based scientific projects. These cases demonstrate that the CSW can promote reflection and positive change in collaborative science.

Development of antibodies to human embryonic stem cell antigens.

BACKGROUND: Using antibodies to specific protein antigens is the method of choice to assign and identify cell lineage through simultaneous analysis of surface molecules and intracellular markers. Embryonic stem cell research can be benefited from using antibodies specific to transcriptional factors/markers that contribute to the "stemness" phenotype or critical for cell lineage. RESULTS: In this report, we have developed and validated antibodies (either monoclonal or polyclonal) specific to human embryonic stem cell antigens and early differentiation transcriptional factors/markers that are critical for cell differentiation into definite lineage. CONCLUSION: These antibodies enable stem cell biologists to conveniently identify stem cell characteristics and to quantitatively assess differentiation.

Psychological research online: report of Board of Scientific Affairs' Advisory Group on the Conduct of Research on the Internet.

As the Internet has changed communication, commerce, and the distribution of information, so too it is changing psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimental methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will themselves change over time. This article describes some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological research via the Internet and offers recommendations to both researchers and institutional review boards for dealing with them. ((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)

Human-computer interaction: psychological aspects of the human use of computing.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a multidisciplinary field in which psychology and other social sciences unite with computer science and related technical fields with the goal of making computing systems that are both useful and usable. It is a blend of applied and basic research, both drawing from psychological research and contributing new ideas to it. New technologies continuously challenge HCI researchers with new options, as do the demands of new audiences and uses. A variety of usability methods have been developed that draw upon psychological principles. HCI research has expanded beyond its roots in the cognitive processes of individual users to include social and organizational processes involved in computer usage in real environments as well as the use of computers in collaboration. HCI researchers need to be mindful of the longer-term changes brought about by the use of computing in a variety of venues.