The E. coli made me do it.

Or that’s how the New Yorker so elegantly puts it.

So how would you react if we told you that bacterial cells outweighed body cells 10 to 1?

Or better yet, that NPR has made one of the most adorable videos EVER describing the Human Microbiome. The background science, however, is only the start of a huge landslide of theories and research that surrounds microbes.

The most recent development? The bacteria that reside in your stomach/intestines might have a huge impact on our mental development, emotional health, and physical wellness.

Our bodies are complex ecosystems evolved from years and years of symbiosis.  The type of bacteria housed in your guts can effect your brain chemistry – outgoing mice became more twitchy when they were transferred microbes from their more anxious peers.

But how can bacteria in your stomach communicate with the great and all-knowing brain?

Simple answer: The Vagus Nerve 

Complex answer? It’s a nerve that extends down from your  brain to stomach. When the nerve was cut in mice, the brain no longer responded to changes in the gut.

 This has been greeted with a lot of hope in the scientific community, mimicking signals from the guts or using probiotics to replace lost microbes could possibly help alleviate the symptoms associated with depression and bipolar disorder.

We don’t know about you guys, but we’re definitely not as germophobic as we used to be.

“Do you believe in global warming?”

This question has been the center of heated environmental debates for decades.

In fact, Republican Senator James Inhofe once proclaimed that global warming was the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

And Senator Inhofe represents the conservative states of this nation, right?

Wrong.

Check out the above picture from a recent study done by Stanford University.

You will notice that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that global warming is real. 

Even those crazy tree huggers in Texas and Oklahoma have joined the club.

And, even more shocking, a majority of those in red states support more significant government action. In Texas, for example, 79 % believe the government should limit greenhouse gas emissions produced by power plants.   

Additionally, a majority of Americans, including those in red states, believe that global warming is caused by humans.

This may reflect the most recent IPCC Report that confirmed that humans are the dominant cause of climate change.

So, if there is this much acceptance of global warming as an issue and such desire for regulation and increased government action, why isn’t congress acting?

Oh, that’s right, 58% of Republicans in the current Congress deny the existence of climate change or oppose action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

We can only hope that our grand old American democracy will start to better represent its people. 

It wasn’t too long ago when the United States was on the brink of attacking Syria.

It wasn’t too long ago when we heard the familiar arguments of “the U.S. is not the world’s police!” and “we have a moral obligation to do something!”

It wasn’t too long ago when Syria destroyed its chemical weapons production facilities.

And it wasn’t too long ago when we settled back into complacency, forgetting all about Syria. 

Yes, Bashar al-Assad’s regime is now unable to use chemical weapons, and they are on track to be destroyed outside of the country.

But does that mean that inhumane and atrocious mass murder has stopped?  Of course not. 

Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report detailing the Syrian government’s use of incendiary weapons in at least 56 attacks since November 2012, when the government intensified its airstrikes.

The most recent, which occured on August 26, 2013, involved an attack on a school full of teenagers in the Aleppo Governorate.  Regime forces dropped a 500kg bomb containing “some kind of jellied fuel-like substance similar to napalm.”

While most were killed instantly, many others had their clothes, including leather belts, melted to their skin.  Numerous children and teenagers later died of their severe burns and wounds. (Find HRW’s video here.  WARNING: video contains graphic footage.)

Where does the world stand on incendiary weapons?  According to HRW’s report, over 107 states were parties to the international protocol banning and restricting incendiary weapons as of October 31, 2013.

If you haven’t guess already, Syria is not one of those parties.  There have been no statements from other parties to the protocol condemning Assad’s regime for the indiscriminate burning that has occurred for over a year. 

Why do chemical weapons constitute a “red line”, and incendiary weapons do not?  

User Experience has come a long way in the last decade, especially in the world of web design. Now more than ever, people are more focused on making sure the user not only has it easy, but also enjoys the product or service that they’re using.

But whilst most people are working to form a more usable and enjoyable web for the user; some work to deceive the user and trick them with UX techniques known as Dark Patterns.

What is a Dark Pattern?

Dark Patterns are user interfaces or user experience techniques designed precisely to trick people. These techniques could be relatively harmless and only leave an unnerving feeling of annoyance with the user. Others though, could cost the user much more financially or even professionally. Though they are not to be confused with Anti-Patterns, which are simply common practices that result in a bad UX (and are not intentionally deceptive).

Essentially the main goal of a Dark Pattern is to trick the user into buying or doing something they would not otherwise. Nielsen Norman Group has a very popular post on design heuristics. Take any of these points and you can generally find a flip side that can be abused as well. For instance:

Consistency and standards: Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.

Following this heuristic it’s common practice within software to keep the “OK” and “cancel” buttons consistent. To do otherwise, could cause confusion or annoyance — which is a bad UX. Replacing the “OK” button occasionally with a “Buy 1000 more appbucks for $0.99” button would be considered a Dark Pattern.

So as you can see, most good user experience practices also have an inverted Dark Pattern as well. While a good UX/UI is there to make things as clear and intuitive as possible, Dark Patterns seek to use confusing logic and double negatives to increase user conversions.

Dark Patterns in marketing

The world of marketing and design tend to butt heads occasionally. One side wants to up-sell the user, and the other wants to let the user do their own thing. Some websites use dark patterns in their marketing strategy, which seeks to drive conversions at the user’s expense; often without their knowledge. These tactics tend to create a surge in subscriptions or add-on product purchases, and while initially successful, they are notoriously short-sighted practices. This type of marketing results in a large one-time customer user base, but an extremely small repeat customer user base. Once the user is aware they were taken advantage of, the service or product is a constant reminder of that bad user experience, and what it cost them.

Marketing can easily fall into such practices to meet conversion goals and drive sales or subscriptions. But thankfully, it’s far more profitable to maintain a good brand image and present the option to up-sell should the user so desire. Amazon is a high profile example of this with their add-on item program and largely successful recommended items sections. They don’t use the Sneak into Basket Dark Pattern and add items into a user’s cart; they do however, sometimes advertise the benefits of adding in such items (like free shipping).

Personal cost of Dark Patterns

The majority of Dark Patterns result in a monetary loss or customer dissatisfaction. While those are certainly important, there is a niche area in the Dark Pattern library which isn’t commonly discussed.

When a website or service uses these patterns at a direct professional cost to the user or customer, people tend to get upset very quickly. With the advent of blogging and social media, everyone now has their own sort of “brand” online. Essentially, people are marketing themselves on social media rather than (or in addition to) products.

In October, Comic Con Attendees were forcefully opted in to tweet promotionally about the event upon entering. During online registration for badges, users could opt to connect social media accounts — something highly useful to promote at such events. Only in this case, users weren’t informed their accounts would be hijacked to tweet without permission. Thankfully, NYCC promptly turned off the automatic opt-in “feature” and later issued a full apology. Though all was well in the end, I somehow doubt many users will preemptively attach their social media accounts to their badges in the future.

Distrust, deception, and anguish

Few companies can say that their user base means little or nothing to them. Those that do are generally in a unique niche market or following alternative business practices. Following that logic, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that a happy and trustful user base is the best asset for a business. So much so in fact, App.net literally drew their business model from the dissatisfaction of Twitter’s users. The following is a quote from App.net’s about page:

Everything that you put into App.net is yours. That means we’ll never sell your posts, private messages, photos, files, feed, clicks, or anything else to advertisers. You’ll always be able to easily back-up, export, or delete all of your data.

Generally speaking, when a website uses Dark Patterns to drive their conversion goals, users get upset and migrate to a more ethical and honest competitor — or they create one.

Using Dark Patterns for better UX

You can use Jakob Nielsen’s Heuristics to create good UX patterns for your users. But you can also look at those patterns as heuristics to create a better end goal for yourself as well.

A one-size fits all approach to UX design is always easier… But creating intrinsic patterns specific to your service or website can result in UX gains for the user, and conversions for you. In the end, a pattern that results in a gain for both the user and the service or website is the goal.

Psychology is the science that these patterns — good and bad — are based upon. Understanding your user and their goals on your website or service is paramount to creating a positive outcome for both parties. In learning what the user is visiting for, and why, you can use that information to increase conversions and offer more relevant, valuable information to the user. Doing so will not only increase your user base’s happiness with your product, but also present the opportunity for you to use far more appropriate ways to increase conversions naturally.

Putting yourself in a user’s shoes

When thinking about good or bad UX, it’s helpful to step away and place yourself in your user’s shoes. Throw your browser in incognito mode, or log out and use your website as a newbie for a while. You may suddenly start to see many areas where your users could become frustrated.

A/B testing is a common solution, where two versions of a website are presented to different test groups to determine which drives conversions better. Though you should be wary of how you go about A/B testing — make sure to keep a sharp eye on how your users react emotionally to using your website as well. Testing purely with the goal of converting can easily lead you down a dark path to the destruction of your website or service. It’s important to have the end goal of a happy user, but it’s also just as important to insure the road to that goal isn’t a hard one.

Some final thoughts

Whilst using Dark Patterns may result in initial success, I can personally promise you they aren’t a sustainable business pattern.

In every case that a major website has resulted to them, users have migrated away or created their own competition eventually. Sometimes this happens nearly overnight, and sometimes it’s a slow fading out into oblivion.

Either way, it never pays to use Dark Patterns at the expense of your customers or users.

Have you considered dark pattern UX? What dark practices are least palatable to you? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, dark side image via FiDalwood

Elite Pro: 850+ Icons Usable As 13 Premium Web Fonts – only $29!

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Finding Story Chains and Creating Story Maps in Newswire Articles

Xianshu Zhu

10:00-12:00pm Monday 25 November 2013, ITE 325B

There are huge amounts of news articles about events published on the Internet everyday. The flood of information on the Internet can easily swamp people, which seems to produce more pain than gain. While there are some excellent search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, to help us retrieve information by simply providing keywords, the problem of information overload makes it hard to understand the evolution of a news story. Conventional search engines display unstructured search results, which are ranked by relevance using keyword-based ranking methods and other more complicated ranking algorithms. However, when it comes to searching for a story (a sequence of events), none of the ranking algorithms above can organize the search results by evolution of the story. Limitations of unstructured search results include: (1) Lack of the big picture on complex stories. In general, news articles tend to describe the news story from different perspectives. For complex news stories, users can spend significant time looking through unstructured search results without being able to see the big picture of the story. For instance, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on August 23, 2005. By typing “Hurricane Katrina” in Google, people can get much information about the event and its impact on the economy, health, and government policies, etc. However, people may feel desperate to sort the information to form a story chain that tells how, for example, Hurricane Katrina has impacted government policies. (2) Hard to find hidden relationships between two events: The connections between news events are sometimes extremely complicated and implicit. It is hard for users to discover the connections without thorough investigation of the search results.

In this dissertation, we seek to extend the capability of existing search engines to output coherent story chains and story maps (a map that demonstrates various perspectives on news events), rather than loosely connected pieces of information. By this means, people can obtain a better understanding of the news story, capture the big picture of the news story quickly, and discover hidden relationships between news events. First of all, algorithms for finding story chains have the following two advantages: (1) they can find out how two events are correlated by finding a chain of events that coherently connect them together. Such story chains will help people discover hidden relationship between two events. (2) they allow users to search by complex queries such as “how is event A related to event B”, which does not work well on conventional keyword-based search engines. Secondly, creating story maps by finding different perspectives on a news story and grouping news articles by the perspectives can help users better capture the big picture of the story and give them suggestions on what directions they can further pursue. From a functionality point of view, the story map is similar to the table of content of a book which gives users a high-level overview of the story and guides them during news reading process.

The specific contributions of this dissertation are: (1) Develop various algorithms to find story chains, including: (a) random walk based story chain algorithm; (b) co-clustering based story chain algorithm which further improves the story chains by grouping semantically close words together and propagating the relevance of word nodes to document nodes; (c) finding story chains by extracting multi-dimensional event profiles from unstructured news articles, which aims to better capture relationships among news events. This algorithm significantly improves the quality of the story chains. (2) Develop an algorithm to create story maps which uses Wikipedia as the knowledge base. News articles are represented in the form of bag-of-aspects instead of bag-of-words. Bag-of-aspects representation allows users to search news articles through different aspects of a news event but not through simple keywords matching.

Committee: Drs. Tim Oates (chair), Tim Finin, Charles Nicholas, Sergei Nirenburg and Doug Oard

NCAA Men’s Soccer Tournament
UMBC faces off against winner of Quinnipiac v. Connecticut
Sunday, November 24, 5 p.m., Retriever Soccer Park
Tickets on sale: http://bit.ly/UMBCNCAA

Get your tickets now! $10 for adults, $7 for faculty and staff, and $5 for seniors 55+/youth 5-14/UMBC students. Children 5 and under free.

Tickets must be picked up at will call. For questions, contact Kristen Alexander at kristen2@umbc.edu.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 now has support in Devart .NET Connectivity Solutions and Developer Tools including LinqConnect, Entity Developer, T4 Editor, and LINQ. Insight.

Geared toward software development companies and including free software updates, forever, and free support, Ubirimi releases Yongo, Documentador and Agile.