Summary: Ocean salinity is a critical component to understanding climate change. Salinity concentrations and temperature drive large ocean currents which in turn drive global weather patterns. Melting ice caps lower salinity at the poles while river deltas bring fresh water into the ocean worldwide. These processes slow ocean currents, changing weather patterns and producing extreme climate events which disproportionally affect those living in poverty. Analysis of salinity presents a unique visualization challenge. Important data are found in narrow data ranges, varying with global location. Changing values of salinity are important in understanding ocean currents, but are difficult to map to colors using traditional tools. Commonly used colormaps may not provide sufficient detail for this data. Current editing tools do not easily enable a scientist to explore the subtleties of salinity. We present a workflow, enabled by an interactive colormap tool that allows a scientist to interactively apply sophisticated colormaps to scalar data. The intuitive and immediate interaction of the scientist with the data is a critical contribution of this work.

Summary: Scientists from the Climate, Ocean and Sea Ice Modeling Team (COSIM) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of three primary ocean currents: the Gulf Stream, the Kuroshio Current, and the Agulhas Current & Retroflection. To address these needs, visual artist Francesca Samsel teamed up with experts from the areas of computer science, climate science, statistics, and perceptual science. By engaging an artist specializing in color, we created colormaps that provide the ability to see greater detail in these high-resolution datasets. The new colormaps applied to the POP dataset enabled scientists to see areas of interest unclear using standard colormaps. Improvements in the perceptual range of color allowed scientists to highlight structures within specific ocean currents. Work with the COSIM team members drove development of nested colormaps which provide further detail to the scientists.

Summary: In this paper, we introduce a direct manipulation tabletop multi-touch user interface for spatial audio scenes. Although spatial audio rendering exists for several decades now, mass market applications have not been developed and the user interfaces still address a small group of expert users. We implemented an easy-to-use direct manipulation interface for multiple users, taking full advantage of the object-based audio rendering mode. Two versions of the user interface have been developed to explore variations in information architecture and will be evaluated in user tests.

Keywords: Word of Mouth; WOM; Word-of-Mouth; Referrals; Electronic Referrals; eReferrals; Internet Marketing; Online Marketing; Customer Acquisition; B2C; Consumer Marketing; Viral Marketing

Summary: This research examines strategies for generating electronic referrals (eReferrals). Acquiring customers through Word of Mouth (WOM) appeals to companies because of the perceived transmitter credibility as well as low customer acquisition cost. Company-initiated eReferrals, a form of online WOM, offer marketers a way to influence customers through encouraging WOM. This research utilized a field experiment focusing on company-initiated eReferrals. Several independent variables were manipulated including incentive magnitudes for the referring party and the party being referred. The dependent variables were the number of referrals made and the number of referrals that led to sales. As expected, larger incentives increased referral rates. In addition, we found that offering the same magnitude incentive to both the referrer and referee led to a greater number of referrals. However when offer incentive magnitudes were not equitable, those with higher offers for the referrer performed better than those with a higher offer for the referee.

Summary: A major concern for systems developers is the problem of user validation of system requirements. To the extent that the requirements representation elicits important feedback from the user, the representation technique can be said to be appropriate for user validation. Moran suggests that users develop a conceptual model of a system defined as the "knowledge that organizes how the system works and how it can be used to accomplish tasks". An experiment is conducted to determine whether a task-oriented, downward-cascading menu representation (similar to what the user would find in a prototyping environment), which closely corresponds to Moran's idea of a user's conceptual model, permits better comprehension and therefore better validation than data-flow diagrams, which have been strongly advocated as facilitating user validation. A within-group, counterbalancing technique to mitigate subject variability was used to test subjects' comprehension of data-flow diagrams vs the task-oriented menu representations of requirements. Subjects scored significantly higher on the test using the menu representation, indicating that task-oriented menus may be more effective in user validation of requirements than data-flow diagrams.