Some men like it black,some women like it pink: consumer implications of differences in male and female website design

• The World Wide Web doubles in size roughly every 2–3 months and dramatic claims are made about the effectiveness of Web‐based commercial efforts. The centrality of non‐price mechanisms of differentiation to the perception, enjoyment and ease of use felt using websites is acknowledged but the only statistically rigorous studies of factors such as form and content have been conducted within a universalist paradigm of aesthetics. This paper reports on an interactionist approach to web aesthetics involving an analysis of 60 male‐ and female‐produced websites. The analysis reveals statistically significant differences between the male‐ and female‐produced websites on 13 out of the 23 factors analysed. These differences span issues of navigation as well as linguistic and visual content. The paper argues that the appeal of websites can be maximised if they mirror the needs and interests of their target populations and that websites targeted at male or female dominated markets need to reflect the aesthetic diversity found in the male‐ and female‐produced websites analysed here. It also presents information on the demographics of the IT profession, showing that there is a potential imbalance between the percentage of women involved online and those involved in the IT profession. This suggests that the male domination of the IT profession could be a barrier to the effective mirroring of female Website preferences.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Increasing donations to supermarket food-bank bins using proximal prompts

There has been little research into interventions to increase participation in donating items to food-bank bins. In New Zealand, there has been an increased demand from food banks (Stewart, 2002). This study demonstrated that point-of-sale prompts can be an effective method of increasing donations to a supermarket food-bank bin.     

The role of functionality in the mental representations of engineering students: some differences in the early stages of expertise

As engineers gain experience and become experts in their domain, the structure and content of their knowledge changes. Two studies are presented that examine differences in knowledge representation among freshman and senior engineering students. The first study examines recall of mechanical devices and chunking of components, and the second examines whether seniors represent devices in a more abstract functional manner than do freshmen. The most prominent differences between these 2 groups involve their representation of the functioning of groups of electromechanical components and how these groups of components interact to produce device behavior. Seniors are better able to construct coherent representations of devices by focusing on the function of sets of components in the device. The findings from these studies highlight some ways in which the structure and content of mental representations of design knowledge differ during the early stages of expertise acquisition.     

Marginal comments on the evolution of self psychology response to editors’ follow'up questions

The author argues that terrorism aims to obliterate the conditions that allow us to distinguish between situations of safety and situations of danger. If we are unable to make that elemental distinction, we necessarily doubt the value of our own immediate thoughts, perceptions, and ideas. Psychoanalytic theory offers an alternative to immediacy. I think psychoanalytically about an object, one must identify with it and doing so to think of what the terrorists meant we must find a way to identify with them. This entails consciously working against the strong appeals of disidentification. Disidentification is the precondition for pitilessness and, as such, is the precondition for limitless activities directed against the objects of our hatred. It matters what the terrorists meant, then. It matters that we find our way to identifying with what we think they meant. The moment we conclude that it does not matter, we loosen the checks on our own capacities for terrorizing.     

Applied Research and Zoo Education: The Evolution and Evaluation of a Public Talks Program using Unobtrusive Video Recording of Visitor Behavior

ABSTRACT

The provision of high-quality conservation education has become a priority for modern zoos. This can be delivered in a number of differing ways to account for differences in learning styles and prior knowledge of zoo visitors. At Chester Zoo (United Kingdom), a team of full-time and highly trained interpreters (known as presenters) deliver a diverse public talks program every day of the year. Although these talks attract a large audience, little was understood about their impact on the visitor. As a result, an extensive, unobtrusive study using video recording equipment was undertaken to assess visitor behavior. Results suggest that visitor attentiveness was much higher among those individuals who found themselves in a better viewing position (where they could see the animal and presenter). Visitors who were in poor-visibility positions showed less attention than visitors who were observed under control conditions, without an accompanying talk, indicating a high environmental component to learning potential. When interactive elements were included in a talk (such as an animal feed or enrichment activity) attentiveness was dramatically increased. More crucially, however, was that during talks where there was no interactivity or animals were inactive, attentiveness fell to below control levels, suggesting that heightened visitor expectations created by the anticipation for the talk were not being met—a serious barrier to learning. These findings offer a series of measures that can be taken to improve the educational impact of a zoo talks program whilst, at the same time, providing a better quality experience for zoo visitors.     

Towards a distributed account of conceptual knowledge

How is conceptual knowledge organized and represented? Are domains (such as living things) and categories (such as tools, fruit) represented explicitly or can domain and category structure emerge out of a distributed system? Taken at face value, evidence from brain-damaged patients and neuroimaging studies suggests that conceptual knowledge is explicitly structured in independent content-based stores. However, recent analyses of the fine-grained details of semantic impairments, combined with research using connectionist modelling, suggest a different picture - one in which concepts are represented as patterns of activation over multiple semantic properties within a unitary distributed system. Within this context, category-specific deficits emerge as a result of differences in the structure and content of concepts rather than from explicit divisions of conceptual knowledge in separate stores.     

Brief Comments on Collective Bargaining at the University of Bridgeport: 1974–1987

When Leland Miles arrived as the University of Bridgeport's new president in 1974, the institution had substantial financial problems, declining enrollments, and a newly unionized faculty. This essay is a first-person account of his efforts to work with an immature union and his attempt to save the Liberal Arts at a time of growing student demand for professional degrees.     

An MMPI typology of cocaine abusers.

Three types were found in a cluster analysis of scores on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) of 100 men voluntarily presenting for treatment of cocaine abuse. Type 1 (n = 59) had a mean MMPI profile consistent with the hypothesized grouping of persons who self-medicate with cocaine as a means of overcoming depression. The relatively normal mean MMPI profile obtained by Type 2 (n = 37) suggested little indication of significant psychopathology. Type 3's (n = 4) mean MMPI profile suggested either severe disturbance or profile invalidity. Types were found to differ in the nature of drug use, reactions to cocaine, education level, and social class, but not on the scales of the Adjective Check List.