Willpower

We all sit staring at computer screens for long periods during the day. In fact, some of us spend long periods in the evening staring at computer screens too! And as we sit there – getting on with whatever work needs doing, working through our e-mail, and occasionally checking Facebook to see what people with a life are doing – are we affecting our ability to crack on and really persevere with challenges? That’s a question that was answered back in 1984. And the answer is YES!

I’ve been to some organizations where people plug their laptops into workstations resulting in the screen being quite high up and the user having to then use a second keyboard and a mouse because they can’t reach the laptop’s keyboard in this position. They have to look up to do any useful work. I always thought this was a strange and unnatural way of working.

Most people I see working on their laptops have the laptops in front of them – on a desk at work, or on their lap elsewhere. I’ve also seen people using tablets (and iPads) in much the same way. They are hunched over their screens getting on with their work.

So what would happen if you took these two groups of people and then gave them some kind of test – something that measured their perseverence, their willpower to stay on-task. You might think that it wouldn’t make any difference, that there would be factors other than where their computer screen had been put determining how long these people wrestled with a problematic task.

That’s what John Riskind from Texas A&M university decided to investigate – the effects of posture on perseverence. One group was made to sit upright with their shoulders back and their heads up for three minutes. The other group was made to slump for three minutes, with stooped and hunched over backs and their heads dropped down. So the two groups spent three minutes in one of these two positions, pretty much like the two positions that laptop users can adopt.

After the three minutes, participants were sent to a different room and asked to solve several geometric puzzles that involved tracing over a diagram without lifting up the pencil. To make life a bit harder, some of the puzzles were impossible to solve. Riskind timed how long people persevered trying to solve the puzzle.

And he found that people who had been sitting up straight persevered trying to solve the puzzles for almost twice as long as the people who had previously been slouching.

In 2007, picking up on that earlier work, Hyung-il, Teeters, Wang, Breazeal, and Picard asked people to actually sit at a computer and work on a difficult problem. They divided their subjects into two groups – with one group using a monitor placed low down so they had to stoop, and the second group using a monitor that was placed slightly above their eye-line, so they had to sit up straight.

By now, you can guess the results of this second piece of research. People who sat up straight because their monitor was higher up persevered for longer than the people who slouched over their monitor.

What can we conclude from these two pieces of research? Well, if you want staff at your organization to be highly motivated, you need to ensure the centre of the screens they’re using is slightly above their eye level.

If you want to look up these two studies to make sure that I’m not making this all up (it’s not the 1 April blog!), Riskind published “They stoop to conquer: Guiding with self-regulatory functions of physical posture after success and failure” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (issue 47, pages 479-493, if you must know). The second study in 2007 was entitled “Stoop to Conquer: Posture and affect interact to influence computer users; persistence” and was presented at the 2nd International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 12-14 September 2007 in Lisbon, Portugal.

It makes you wonder what else we should be doing to get the most out of the human-computer interface.

Linux divisions

Linus Torvalds released Linux on 5 October 1991, and by 1998 IBM was experimenting with it. In 2000 it was properly available on mainframes – along with the specialty processor IFL (Integrated Facility for Linux). The rest, as they say, is history.

As well as mainframes, Linux, of course, runs on desktops and servers. The Mac OS is based on Unix, but Android – found on millions of smartphones and tablets – is based on Linux.

So what divisions am I talking about? The division between big iron and little? Well not really. In fact, interestingly, the people at William Data Systems have come out with a way of monitoring Linux whether it’s on a mainframe or server somewhere else in the world. As long as it has an IP address, they have a way of monitoring it (using z/OS as the hub).

No, the first division I want to look at is the division between the USA (or North America, I should say) and Europe. The recent Arcati Mainframe Yearbook user survey (still freely available at www.arcati.com/newyearbook12) came up with some interesting results. The survey found that  70% of European sites surveyed didn't have Linux, whereas only 28% of North American sites in the surveyed didn’t. That’s a huge difference. And if you were IBM, you might well be wondering why Linux isn’t selling into Europe so well as North America.

Let’s speculate. Is it that North America is well ahead of the curve in terms of take up of mainframe Linux? Is it that mainframe Linux is priced differently either side of the pond so it encourages the take up in the USA but not Europe? Or could it be that IFLs are marked up or down depending on whether the customer is EMEA-based or not? Are IFLs being bundled in with upgrades or not depending on where in the world you’re based? I have recently had some nudges and winks over prices, and it could well be that European mainframe users are being charged double what their US-based counterpart might expect to pay. I’d be interested to hear what figure people, who’ve recently negotiated with IBM, have haggled them down to. You might also wonder whether now is a good time to buy shares in SuSE, who have about an 80% share of the mainframe Linux market. Will we see it suddenly explode in Europe? Or not?

The other division that’s recently cropped up with Linux is how users navigate. I guess we’re all pretty much familiar with using drop-down menus to access what we want – and we can probably use them to find our way around familiar applications without even thinking about it. Even very young childen take to that way of navigating like it was second nature. But just recently we’ve seen the introduction of Heads Up Displays (HUDs) for Ubuntu’s Linux.

What you get is a sort of semi-transparent area at the top of the screen, which acts in some ways like the ribbon with Office. HUD provides a search style interface that uses a Vocabulary UI (VUI). Users start to type or say a command, and the HUD starts a smart look-ahead search through the application and system (indicator) menus. By combining fuzzy matching with a learning function, the HUD begins to ‘recognize’ the actions of each individual user.

If you want to give it a go, HUD will be available in Ubuntu 12.04 towards the end of April.

Now I’m guessing that, like Microsoft’s ribbon, and Marmite, users will either love it or hate it. The idea that it will use voice indicates to me that we’re back to the original Star Trek computer idea – a computer that you can talk to. This was an idea that went away for a while because, to be honest, voice reconition software just wasn’t up to the job. But now we’ve had Siri on iPhones for a while, and people are coming back to the idea that talking to a computer isn’t such a silly idea after all.

I’ve only spoken to one person who’s used the HUD and he was singing its praises. But he is very familiar with Linux and the Ubuntu distro, so maybe he had a clearer idea of what to ask the HUD to do for him – in terms of getting any work done – than, for example, I might have.

Perhaps one day we’ll see a HUD on mainframe Linux. And perhaps we’ll see more mainframe Linux sites in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Or will the divisions continue?