PC Owners Research Articles

Design a Temperature Control System Based on Labview

Temperature is the main environment parameter to industrial and agricultural production. To timely and accurate measurement is having great significance. A lot of production equipment, thermal equipment and large warehouse need for temperature measurement. Therefore, design a kind of ability of temperature automatic detection system has widely application value. This design is mainly on the Labview virtual instrument platform to develop a temperature acquisition system. We use good interface of Labview for data acquisition which is real-time display data in Labview. It can realize serial port function and will transfer to PC owners system. The data collected in the Labview environment for data processing and analysis, and it can accord the analysis of the results to control the singlechip microcomputer temperature.

“I'm a Mac” versus “I'm a PC”: Personality Differences between Mac and PC Users in a College Sample

ABSTRACTOne hundred eight college students who had purchased either a Mac or PC laptop computer completed measures of the Big Five personality traits, ratings of brand characteristics of Macs and PCs, measures of implicit attitudes toward these products, and determinants of brand choices. Big Five personality traits did not differentiate between Mac and PC owners. Students overall rated Macs higher on various product attributes (attractive style, cool, youthful, and exciting) and PCs higher on reasonable price and good for gaming. Brand owners rated their own brands higher on characteristics of reliability, good for homework, ease of use, good for Internet surfing, and good features. PC owners placed greater importance on cost as a determinant of brand choice, whereas Mac owners placed greater emphasis on style. Personality traits may have more nuanced effects on brand choices, as shown by relationships between Neuroticism and greater importance placed on cost and lesser importance placed on ease of use. Openness to Experience was associated with greater importance placed on reliability and lesser importance placed on style. Supporting the predictive validity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) in predicting consumer preferences, Mac owners showed more favorable implicit attitudes and stronger implicit self‐identification with Macs than did PC owners. Implicit attitudes also predicted self‐reported ratings of various product characteristics.

The challenge of designing for diversity in older users

Purpose: The older population is not a homogenous group and show significant diversity in constitution, capabilities and experience. In order for new and emerging digital technologies to be inclusive, it is crucial to encompass this diversity and employ a design process that is sensitive to it. Current approaches to inclusive design tend to seek one design for all, focusing on users who are least engaged with digital technology. In this paper we outline an alternative approach to inclusive design based on co-design with both digitally engaged and unengaged user groups. In our study, as part of a multi-disciplinary group in the New Dynamics of Ageing (UK) funded collaborative research project, older people from different walks of life were invited to four different themed workshops called ‘sandpits’ to explore current and emerging technologies in a playful and creative context to help them envisage the potential implications these technologies can have in their lives as well as to identify key issues and user requirements for further development. This paper will discuss the outcome from three of those sandpits. The themes explored in these three sandpits were 1) Custom computers for older people 2) Supporting Identity and memory in later life and 3) Social connections with new technology. Methods. A total of 66 older people participated in the three sandpits conducted between 2009 and 2010. Separated into PC and non-PC users groups, they were involved in discussions and shown open ambiguous envisionments that responded to the themes through hands-on demonstration, role-play or dramatic enactment of their use. Broadly taking into account the role of technology generations effects, the envisionments were modeled and presented as appliances, incorporating forms of products and interactions that older people are familiar with to encourage in-clusion. The older participants were then involved in the redesign of these envisionments through a collaborative design process. Results and discussion The design responses from older PC and non-PC user groups revealed a difference in the type of embodiment they want for Internet-enabled applications. Both groups redesigned the concepts based on their experience, interests, familiarity with the technology they have and its associated infrastructure or lack thereof. In general, non-PC user groups preferred the appliance nature of the envisionments, and incorporated the functions they were interested in performing, such as capturing spoken stories, sharing photographs, chatting over TV programmes, etc into these appliances. In contrast, PC owners questioned the need for separate appliances and often re-designed them as PC applications or Internet services with emphasis placed on modality and compatibility with their existing infrastructure. The paper will discuss the difficulty and challenge of bridging the gap between the diversity of technology and its users.

Personal Computers and Media Use

About one in five people own a personal computer but not many of these owners spend much time with the computer. Of owners, only about 20% spend as much as 1–2 hours per day. This study, based on a telephone survey of a Southwestern city, finds that owners are more affluent than non PC owners and read the local morning paper more. But PC owners and nonowners differed little in amount of television news viewed. Ownership of a personal computer apparently did not lead to radical changes in use of traditional news media.