Humans vs Computers is a book about people caught between wrong assumptions and computer bugs. You'll read about humans who are invisible to computers, how a default password once caused a zombie apocalypse and why airlines sometimes give away free tickets. This is also a book on how to prevent, avoid and reduce the impact of such problems. Our lives are increasingly tracked, monitored and categorised by software, driving a flood of information into the vast sea of big data. In this brave new world, humans can't cope with information overload. Governments and companies alike rely on computers to automatically detect fraud, predict behaviour and enforce laws. Inflexible automatons, barely smarter than a fridge, now make life-changing decisions. Clever marketing tricks us into believing that phones, TV sets and even cars are somehow smart. Yet all those computer systems were created by people - people who are well-meaning but fallible and biased, clever but forgetful, and who have grand plans but are pressed for time. Digitising a piece of work doesn't mean there will be no mistakes, but instead guarantees that when mistakes happen, they'll run at a massive scale. The next time you bang your head against a digital wall, the stories in this book will help you understand better what's going on and show you where to look for problems. If nothing else, when it seems as if you're under a black-magic spell, these stories will at least allow you to see the lighter side of the binary chaos. For people involved in software delivery, this book will help you find more empathy for people suffering from our mistakes, and discover heuristics to use during analysis, development or testing to make your software less error prone. About the author Gojko Adzic is a partner at Neuri Consulting LLP, winner of the 2016 European Software Testing Outstanding Achievement Award, and the 2011 Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Award. Gojko's book Specification by Example won the Jolt Award for the best book of 2012, and his blog won the UK Agile Award for the best online publication in 2010. Gojko is a frequent keynote speaker at leading software development conferences and one of the authors of MindMup and Claudia.js. As a consultant, Gojko has helped companies around the world improve their software delivery, from some of the largest financial institutions to small innovative startups.

Silicon Valley gets all the credit for digital creativity, but this account of the pre-PC world, when computing meant more than using mature consumer technology, challenges that triumphalism. The invention of the personal computer liberated users from corporate mainframes and brought computing into homes. But throughout the 1960s and 1970s a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Their networks were centered in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, but they connected far-flung users. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto. By imagining computing as an interactive commons, the early denizens of the digital realm seeded today’s debate about whether the internet should be a public utility and laid the groundwork for the concept of net neutrality. Rankin offers a radical precedent for a more democratic digital culture, and new models for the next generation of activists, educators, coders, and makers.

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is concerned with every aspect of the relationship between computers and people (individuals, groups and society). The annual meeting of the British Computer Society's HCI group is recognized as one of the main venues for discussing recent trends and issues. This volume contains refereed papers and reports from the 1995 meeting. The materials cover a broad range of HCI related topics, including visualization, computer supported communication, task analysis, formal methods, user support and cyberspace. The documents consider both research and commercial perspectives, making the book essential for all researchers, designers and manufacturers who need to keep abreast of developments in HCI.

Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology. Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother's casual remark, "I wish I'd used my calculus," hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world. The book begins with the return of Halley's comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration. When Computers Were Human is the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community. In the end, they were rewarded by a new electronic machine that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.

Hidden Human Computers discusses how in the 1950s, black women made critical contributions to NASA by performing calculations that made it possible for the nation's astronauts to fly into space and return safely to Earth. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

Weiss illustrates how to facilitate good performance by correcting problems facing computer users: moving around the system; getting good explanations about how things work; and communicating with the system. Anyone who is responsible for the performance of computer users will learn to improve human performance by improving interactions between people and computers. Sample computer screens.

The need for ensuring that usability measurement results can contribute to the ongoing development of a software product in a formative way is the main theme of this paper. It is recognized that acquiring, structuring, and analysing data about the actual progression of a product's development is a challenging task. Even more difficult, is the problem of making the results of any analysis of that data readily accessible to all the participants at regular intervals in the process. The paper presents an approach to supporting that process exemplified in SEDRES (Systems Engineering Data Representation and Exchange Standardization), a European Aerospace collaborative project on developing a data exchange capability for design tools. The main subject is the role of a software tool called NUD*IST (Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorizing) (QSR, 1997), in providing support for structuring and analysing longitudinal data and for regular feedback to the project partners about the product under development. The paper begins with an overview of the context of use, a systems engineering project involving five major companies in the European Aerospace industry. SEDRES is a three year project which started in January 1996, co-funded by an ESPRIT grant from the European Commission. The project partners comprise Aerospatiale, Alenia, British Aerospace, Daimler-Benz Aerospace, Saab and Linkoping University (Sweden), the Australian Centre for Test & Evaluation (ACTE), and Loughborough University Telecommunications and Computer-Human Interaction (LUTCHI) Research Centre.