Computer Magazine Research Articles

IEEE Computer Magazine Seeks Editor in Chief

IEEE Computer Magazine Seeks Editor in Chief

Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness by Michael Black

Reviewed by: Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness by Michael Black Luke Fernandez (bio) Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness By Michael Black. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 280. Michael Black begins Transparent Designs by describing Steve Jobs's design philosophy for Apple. In 1984, Jobs explained that the company aspired "to reach the point where the operating system is totally transparent. When you use a Lisa or a Macintosh. … You never interact with it; you don't know about it." Black uses this anecdote (and many others like it) to illustrate the idea of transparent design and how it is hyped. [End Page 618] For its advocates, the complexities of the computer should be erased, to the point of becoming invisible. They believe simplifying the interface creates more user-friendly experiences. Black argues that these conceptions of transparent design and user-friendliness, which emerged in the early 1980s, were hyped by corporate tech evangelists (like Jobs) as well as by tech journalists who wrote for computer magazines like BYTE. As Black suggests, resonances of this rhetoric were also manifest among academic researchers and human-computer interaction scholars. Black is suspicious of this design-talk. He suggests that transparent design conceals as much as it reveals and allows designers to hide their own intents behind the guise of user-friendly interfaces, giving the impression that the user's interests are paramount. Yet in hiding so many functional aspects of the computer, accountability is compromised, enabling designers to pursue their own invisible ends. Citing Safiya Noble, Black mentions how search engines present themselves as neutral tools. But under the cover of simple interfaces, they are being tweaked in the service of surveillance capitalism. Black proposes to lift or pull back "the veil of transparency" (pp. 25, 225, 229, 230) and usher in a new approach to design that will unmask the way technology serves to distribute power between designers and users and within society as a whole. Transparent Designs ends with a coda titled "Imagining an Unfriendly Future." At times the coda reads like a manifesto, touting the need for a more capacious and politically inflected understanding of what user-friendliness and transparency should mean. In spite of the ending, though, Transparent Designs is primarily a history. It traces the origins of transparent design and how it developed as a reaction to 1970s hobbyist computing, which preached an ethos of self-reliance and invited tinkering. Many readers may already be aware of how Apple, IBM's PC, and the counterculture jockeyed to cast themselves as antiauthoritarian while labeling their rivals as authoritarian. But "transparent design" is a novel lens through which to tell these stories. Black works in an English department, and it is interesting to see the tropes that scholars in this discipline use to make sense of interfaces. Black approvingly quotes Lori Emerson (an English professor at the University of Colorado) who talks of the interface as a "magician's cape, continually revealing … and concealing as it reveals." I suspect that it has not occurred to most technology scholars to use veils, or the irony they invoke, to make sense of their subject matter. Black makes effective use of these tropes in his history. Provocative as it is to think of transparency as something that actually conceals, I do wish that Black had spent additional time exploring more conventional usages of the term. For example, for those of us who grew up in the 1970s, it was common to run across clear plastic models of V8 engines and of human bodies, revealing rather than concealing complexity. Analogous forms of transparency are also available in open-source code repositories and the organizations that support those repos. Open-source [End Page 619] codes invite users to tinker and to consider how the code distributes power between its developer and users. These are transparent designs in a more conventional mold that actually aspire to reveal technological complexity and the politics inherent in that complexity. Black mentions open-source evangelists but does not give their conception of transparency much weight because he thinks the movement has been coopted. It is also curious that...

Kitchen Bytes

This article discusses the history of kitchen computers and robots in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Kitchen computers are programmable devices located in kitchens that perform logical operations and are often equipped with software to aid in cooking. However, as discussed in this article, marketers and journalists tend to anthropomorphize kitchen computers in descriptions and discuss these kitchen computers as if they are robots. Robots are machines that are programmable by a computer, which can carry out a complex series of actions automatically. Kitchen robots, therefore, are related to kitchen computers yet are not the same thing. In the cultural imaginary, including in movies, television, and advertisements, kitchen robots represent the desire for leisure, luxury, and a reprieve from the burdens of cooking. However, the development of these technologies and their surrounding discourse were more complicated than films and computer magazines made them out to be. Kitchen robots and computers are typically coded as white and female. Their marketing promotes a retrofuturist vision in which outdated gender models are projected onto contemporary—or even emerging—technologies that reinscribe sexist, racist, and heterosexist stereotypes. While the promise of kitchen computers and robots seems progressive, these technologies do not threaten the gendered division of household cooking. Instead, these devices offered women a reprieve from the drudgery of kitchen tasks through a capitalist solution: a product buys a woman’s reprieve rather than upending the nuclear heterosexual family and redefining household roles that create a more equitable division of housework.

The Role of Microcomputer Clubs in the Education of the Polish Youth in the 1980s: A Retrospective Analysis

In the 1980s, Polish schools hardly had access to computers, particularly at the primary and secondary levels. The main reasons were funds and shortage of qualified staff that could handle computer hardware. As a consequence, the youth first came across a computer, how to use it, service hardware, and write programs outside schools in the early 1980s. Often informal groups of hobbyists gathered around a single computer were the seeds of microcomputer clubs, which cropped up in huge numbers in Poland in the 1980s. The objective of the paper is to portray the role of microcomputer clubs in the process of shaping the youth and computer education in the 1980s in Poland compared to other countries. The conclusions are founded on a literature review. The analyzed material included an Internet Archive collection “The Computer Magazine Archives”. The content of one of the first Polish computer magazines, Bajtek Magazine was analyzed in detail. It has been demonstrated that the Polish youth of the 1980s first came across a computer mainly outside schools, primarily in microcomputer clubs. It was the root of computer and information technology education in Poland. Moreover, microcomputer clubs were reported to provide education, as well as foster character education, aid socialization, and shape attitudes.

Road warriors to digital nomads: portable computers, habitats, and remote work

ABSTRACT This article focuses on two users of early portable computers – the ‘road warrior’ and ‘digital nomad’ of the 1980s and 90s – to illustrate how portability has served an imperialist function in engineering a world fit for buffering privileged subjects against conditions of existential precariousness. The label ‘road warriors’ emerged in the early history of portable computers as a reaction against the hostile environs of airports and aeroplanes, spaces that were deemed unaccommodating to the use of laptops. These complaints made clear the importance of portable milieus, spaces that had to come into existence to accommodate the transversal of portable computers. The article examines how these emergent portable milieus functioned also as pedagogical habitats, worldly enclosures that guided white, middle/upper-classed, male executives on the means to adapt to a precarious economic existence. Drawing from computer magazines, news articles, and the manifesto Digital Nomad, the article illustrates how these habitats romanticized the value of remote workers, legitimated their transformation of environments, and laid a foundation for the world to be engineered as a buffer for privileged populations. The trend of digital nomadism today which seeks to create opportunities for the austere good life amidst endemic economic problems in the West, speaks to the currency of this imaginary and the longstanding politics of remote work, ushered in by portable computers.

Decoding the Cauzin Softstrip: a case study in extracting information from old media

Having content in an archive is of limited value if it cannot be read and used. As a case study of extricating information from obsolete media, making it readable once again through deep learning techniques, we examine the Cauzin Softstrip: one of the first two-dimensional bar codes, released in 1985 by Cauzin Systems, which could be used for encoding all manner of digital data. Softstrips occupy a curious middle ground, as they were both physical and digital. The bar codes were printed on paper, and in that sense are no different in an archival way than any printed material. Softstrips can be found in old computer magazines, computer books, and booklets of software Cauzin produced. However, managing the digital nature of these physical artifacts falls within the scope of digital curation. To make the information on them readable and useful, the digital information needs to be extracted, which originally would have occurred using a physical Cauzin Softstrip reader. Obtaining a working Softstrip reader is already extremely difficult and will most likely be impossible in the coming years. In order to extract the encoded data, we created a digital Softstrip reader, making Softstrip data accessible without needing a physical reader. Our decoding strategy is able to decode over 91% of the 1229 Softstrips in our Softstrip corpus; this rises to 99% if we only consider Softstrip images produced under controlled conditions. Furthermore, we later acquired another set of 117 Softstrips and we were able to decode nearly 95% of them with no adjustments to the decoder. These excellent results underscore the fact that technology like deep learning is readily accessible to non-experts; we obtained these results using a convolutional neural network, even though neither of the authors are expert in the area.

Evaluation of Artificial Neural Network, using Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution

Computer systems based on artificial neural networks, often known as neural networks or neural nets, are modeled after the organic neural networks seen in animal brains. Artificial neurons are a group of interconnected units or nodes that serve as the foundation of an ANN and are meant to approximate the function of biological brain neurons. This article contains a survey of practical uses for neural networks. It offers a taxonomy of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), in-forms the reader of recent and upcoming developments in ANN applications research, and highlights research areas of interest. This paper also discusses the difficulties, contributions, comparative effectiveness, and important methodologies in ANN applications. The study examines a wide range of ANN applications in numerous disciplines, including computing, science, engineering, medicine, the environment, agriculture, mining, technology, climate, business, and the arts similar to nanotechnology. This study analyses performance assesses ANN contributions and criticizes techniques. The study discovered that artificial neural networks with feedforward and feedback propagation do well when applied to solving human problems. Therefore, based on data analysis characteristics such as accuracy, processing speed, latency, fault tolerance, volume, scalability, convergence, and efficiency, we presented feed-forward and feedback propagation ANN models for research centers. A computational model known as an artificial neural network (ANN) is composed of many processing elements that accept inputs and produce outputs by their specified activation functions. This article will make other articles in this computer magazine easier to grasp for those who know little or nothing about ANNs. We go over the reasons for creating ANNs, the fundamentals of a biological neuron and an artificial computer model, network designs, learning mechanisms, and some of the most widely used ANN models. A successful ANN character recognition application brings us to a close. EDAS Evaluation Based on Distance from Average Solution method for Notebook(n1), Notebook(n2), Notebook(n3), Notebook(n4), Notebook(n5). Notebook (n1), Notebook (n2), Notebook (n3), Notebook (n4), Notebook (n5). Speed (MHz), RAM (Mbytes), Display (inches), Price (Euro). Notebook (n5) has the highest rank whereas Notebook (n1) has the lowest rank. The need for hybrid systems, Optical Neural Networks, EDAS Method.

Pervasive Ideals

Introduces the article presented in this issue of the publication, “Enabling the Internet of Things” (Want, R., et al), which was published in Computer Magazine, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 28–35, January 2015.

The Manual Memex

Here we introduce a new column that explores IEEE Computer Magazine’s contribution to the computing literature and how it is laying the foundation for the future of computer science and engineering.

IEEE Computer Magazine Call for 2019 Major Awards Nominations

IEEE Computer Magazine Call for 2019 Major Awards Nominations

A Study of Speech Acts in Computer Products Advertisements

This research, which is entitled “A Study of Speech Acts of Computer Products Advertisements ”aims to find out the illocutionary acts that exist in computer products advertisements. To get the results, the data were collected through library research. The data were collected from various foreign computer magazines. The result shows that there are two patterns of illocutionary acts that exist in computer products advertisement. i.e. assertive-expressive and directive- expressive.

Home Computing's Halcyon Days: Discourse Frames in Computer Magazines in the Mid-1980s

Home Computing's Halcyon Days: Discourse Frames in Computer Magazines in the Mid-1980s

Editor's Reflection: The Pivot to Print

Editor's Reflection:The Pivot to Print Kevin M. Lerner This number of The Journal of Magazine Media marks the end of an era. When the journal launched, it was one of very few journals of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication that published in a digital-only format. The 18 volumes of the journal to have been published so far (this issue marking the last of volume 18) have followed that format. Our production process has not evolved much since the turn of the millennium. Submissions come to us by email. We track manuscripts on a spreadsheet. We send them to our reviewers by email. We track our (wonderful) reviewers by email. We prepare manuscripts in Microsoft Word, according to a style sheet that I hand wrote in a notebook when the guidelines were sent to me by former editor Carol Schwalbe. We wouldn't get anything done if it weren't for the journal's editorial assistant, Caroline Chan, emailing us every two weeks with a to-do list. But with the next volume of The Journal of Magazine Media, we are taking a step into the future of the journal by taking a step into the past. We are moving to print. The journal has signed a contract with the University of Nebraska Press to publish us. None of the editorial staff will change (though Caroline will graduate soon), but we will be moving to a fully functioning manuscript management system, and we will have the support of the terrific staff at UNP, who have already mocked up some sample covers and interiors for us. I can't wait to see it. In the meantime, all of the back numbers will be available where you have always found them, and we will keep readers apprised of their final disposition once we have made the transition completely. Volume 18, No. 1, however, contains treats. We open with essays from Elizabeth Hendrickson and Abe Peck about the changing nature of editorial work, introduced by David Abrahamson. We also feature three peer-reviewed articles. First, Susan Jacobson, Jacqueline Marino, and Robert E. Gutsche, Jr., investigate whether or not interactive news applications enhance the news reading experience for Millennial users. Terry L. Britt looks back more than three decades at the "halcyon days" of home computer magazines through the discursive frameworks they established. And finally, Pamela Hill Nettleton examines the discourses of violence directed at women in Maxim. As a trio, they speak to the journal's transition: Jacobson, Marino, and Gutsche look to the future of interactivity; Britt examines a moment when the best way to learn about electronic media was through print media; and Nettleton undertook a study that was impossible without print, since exceedingly few academic libraries maintain digital archives of Maxim. And to continue the celebration of print, we also present a whopping eight book reviews. As always, thank you to Caroline Chan; to Joy Jenkins, our Associate Editor, who handles correspondence with our reviewers, and who I always trust with our more quantitative work; to Miglena Sternadori, the indefatigable reviews editor; and to Carol Schwalbe—who turns all of these pdfs into an actual journal. If all goes well, her job should get much easier after this issue. And of course, thank you to our anonymous peer reviewers, who have made this journal what it is. Kevin M. Lerner Marist College kevin.lerner@marist.edu Copyright © 2008-2018 AEJMC Magazine Division

A Research on Presentation of Violence in Social Media: Opinions of Facebook Users

Element of violence which was seen almost every day in all media but in no way could be prevented is reflecting a bitter side of life. Today that we called age of information, technology rapidly improved, and thanks to this there found solutions for a lot of matters, we are unfortunately are living violence more heavy day by day. Consequently, elements of violence lived are taking part in television and computer screens, and magazine and newspaper pages. Although it is an un approved and unwanted matter of fact, violence’s existing in life is keeping this phenomenon fresh in media’s agenda. It is known that there executed researches and studies about in what direction violence was presented in almost all units of media organs. In this study, how violence was used on Facebook that was used especially among young ones in last ten years and had high popularity had been searched. With this aim, a focus group study had been executed in November 2015 on university students. Information that representation of violence was done over Facebook had been obtained in the study. Violence done over Facebook is conceiving alienation, polarization and hate together with itself. As a consequence, shares done through Facebook can last with very close friends’ erasing each other from their personal Facebook pages in time, and this situation is called as violence.

Interoperable Privacy-Aware E-Participation within Smart Cities

Sharing data via information and communications technology is a fundamental goal of e-government, but data fusion and data mining could reveal sensitive personal information. A proposed cryptographic protocol guarantees citizens' privacy through data aggregation and fosters e-participation in a scalable and interoperable way. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/xTcHNhC3cHw is an audio recording of Computer magazine Editor in Chief Sumi Helal interviewing Constantinos Patsakis about a cryptographic protocol that guarantees citizens privacy through data aggregation and fosters e-participation in a scalable and interoperable way.

TekMountain: A Community-Driven Corporate Incubator

A model business incubator in Wilmington, North Carolina, fosters entrepreneurial spirit by providing a physical space and work atmosphere conducive to interaction and innovation. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/SzbjN2rg-rE is a video interview in which Computer magazine Advisory Panel member Alf Weaver interviews Audrey Speicher about a model business incubator in Wilmington, North Carolina, that fosters an entrepreneurial spirit by providing a physical space and work atmosphere conducive to interaction and innovation.

The Role of Public Comprehensive Universities in Closing the Innovation Deficit

An ambitious initiative by the University of North Carolina Wilmington demonstrates how public nonresearch universities can help close the US innovation deficit by encouraging local entrepreneurship and regional economic development. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/-FOmleTOlak is a video interview in which Computer magazine Advisory Panel member Alf Weaver interviews Chancellor Gary L. Miller about an ambitious initiative by the University of North Carolina Wilmington that demonstrates how public nonresearch universities can help close the US innovation deficit by encouraging local entrepreneurship and regional economic development.

Augmented Reading: The Present and Future of Electronic Scientific Publications

As technological, economic, and social factors drive scientific publishing toward electronic formats, opportunities open beyond traditional reading and writing frameworks. Journal articles now, and in the future, can increasingly include a variety of supplemental multimedia and interactive materials for augmented reading that will impact both the nature and presentation of scientific research. The IEEE Computer Society is preparing for this evolution. The first Web extra at http://youtu.be/06J3yg0SV8o is a video that serves as a short abstract of the paper "Augmented Reading: The Present and Future of Electronic Scientific Publications," presented by the two authors with the support of two young promising scientists. The second Web extra at http://youtu.be/86nN1gCMc1E is a video by David Alan Grier (IEEE Computer Society President, 2013) that discusses the Computer Society and its plans for scientific publications. The third Web extra at http://youtu.be/GCCMYR5Zy70 is a video that collects the personal views of Dejan Milosevic (IEEE CS President, 2014), David A. Grier (IEEE CS President, 2013), Sorel Reisman (IEEE CS President, 2012), Jon Rokne (IEEE CS Publications), Fabrizio Lombardi (EIC IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing and member of the IEEE CS Board of Governors), and Steve Woods (IEEE CS Senior Manager Multimedia, Production) about the future of scientific publications. The fourth Web extra at http://youtu.be/7cLNV4SNdjY is a video presentation of the multimedia enhancements Computer magazine offers to its readers each month. The fifth Web extra at http://youtu.be/4csCKb685XQ is a video that presents a collection of definitions for the term "supplemental material." The sixth Web extra at http://youtu.be/d7a7XxMT6eY is a video that reviews the announcement from the Journal of Neuroscience that authors can no longer submit supplemental material. The seventh Web extra at http://youtu.be/NMFwLJhv11c is a video in which author Paolo Montuschi summarizes the key concepts of the article "Augmented Reading: The Present and Future of Electronic Scientific Publications."

La influencia visual de IBM en las primeras cabeceras de revistas españolas de informática para usuarios

In the early eighties coexist a wide range of computers –Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad– but IBM (International Business Machines) is the brand that wins the battle in the market for personal computers, compatible Personal Computer (PC). The current IBM logo was designed by Paul Rand in the midfifties and after the international projection of this company, its visual appearance causes a strong influence and begins to be imitated by companies, institutions, computer stores, electronics shops and more specifically for the publishing of magazines especialized in computing for final users. This research brings us back to the first Spanish headers specialized in computer users and especially for those in which this influence is evident. This analysis is part of a large research titled: Design evolution of computer magazines for advanced users in Spain. This research brings us back to the earliest Spanish headers specialized in computing for users and especially for those in which this influence is evident. This analysis is part of a large research titled: Design evolution of computer magazines for advanced users in Spain.

Big Data: New Opportunities and New Challenges [Guest editors' introduction

We can live with many of the uncertainties of big data for now, with the hope that its benefits will outweigh its harms, but we shouldn't blind ourselves to the possible irreversibility of changes-whether good or bad-to society. The first Web extra at http://youtu.be/24czULRCI9c is an audio recording in which Katina Michael at the University of Wollongong discusses the June 2013 Computer magazine special issue on "Big Data: New Opportunities and New Challenges," introducing the special issue, the guest editors, the authors, the articles, and the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). The second Web extra at http://youtu.be/9zpFqEDydDA is an audio recording in which Katina Michael at the University of Wollongong talks about the IEEE Society on the Social Implications of Technology (SSIT), IEEE Technology and Society (T&S) magazine, and the International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS). The third Web extra at http://youtu.be/mn_9YHV2RGQis an audio recording in which Katina Michael at the University of Wollongong discusses how we can live with many of the uncertainties of big data for now, with the hope that its benefits will outweigh its harms, but we shouldnít blind ourselves to the possible irreversibility of changes-whether good or bad-to society.