Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

Keep testing the waters.

Participant Behavior in PHONELAB

This abstract examines the behavior of the participants in PHONELAB, a public smartphone testbed being developed at SUNY Buffalo. Currently consisting of 191 participants using Nexus S 4G smartphones, PHONELAB aims to provide a combination of unique features desirable for smartphone experimentation. This abstract briefly introduces PHONELAB and presents some of the early results of a usage meas...

Challenges in Participant Recruiting For Usability Testing

Effective participant recruiting is crucial to collecting reliable data during usability testing of high-tech products and services. Not only should test participants reflect the characteristics of the targeted users of the product or service, but they also must be likely to use it. Only then will their experiences and opinions yield reliable data for identifying meaningful improvements. This p...

Testing the political waters of healthcare reform.

~| y electing Democrat Harris Wofford B to the Senate over former Attorney General Richard T h o r n b u r g h in November 1991, the voters of Pennsylvania proved that healthcare reform is a politically salient issue. Policy analysts, amazed that Wofford's healthcare reform message was a key factor in his election, have debated during the past few months whether this was a fluke or the precurso...

Group Testing with Pools of Fixed Size

In the classical combinatorial (adaptive) group testing problem, one is given two integers d and n, where 0 ≤ d ≤ n, and a population of n items, exactly d of which are known to be defective. The question is to devise an optimal sequential algorithm that, at each step, tests a subset of the population and determines whether such subset is contaminated (i.e. contains defective items) or otherwis...