San Francisco focus group invites lefties to commiserate, try new products
Left-handers are reputed to be creative, versatile, intelligent and resilient. Do these traits inhabit the left-handed gene, or are they a product of every lefty’s daily struggles in a right-handed world? At 15 percent of the population, the left-handers are certainly the outliers in a world engineered by right-handers for right-handers. 
From right-handed desktops in school to right-handed scissors and can openers, most products leave the lefties in the lurch, forced to adapt to doing their daily tasks “backward.”
Oakland, Calif., left-handed products retailer Lefty’s San Francisco began conducting focus groups with lefties to glean information on how they can better meet their unmet needs. A group of lefty volunteers of both genders and all ages were invited to Lefty’s San Francisco’s corporate office to try out and review a range of current and potential products, including pens and notebooks, knives, corkscrews, left-handed cooking tools, left-handed guitars, computer mice and more.
Some findings from the focus group included that adult lefties have had to adapt and have done so successfully. Many lefties believe they no longer have difficulty using right-handed tools. In fact, using left-handed tools often takes a little training for adults. Conversely, kids take to the left-handed products much more readily. Knives are the most complicated left-handed products to review, and the left-handed tomato knife was warmly received.
In an age of ergonomic design, when office chairs have five different adjustments and sports equipment is manufactured in variations fitting every body type, ability level and style of use, products designed for left-handers are becoming more available.
New algorithm could help detect sarcasm in user responses
Sarcasm is a language tool most people have used in daily life to convey their emotions and attitudes, but it can be extremely hard to pick up on – and easy to misinterpret – in written form, namely product reviews and survey responses. As a result, sarcasm is often left out of the written word even though it’s a natural tool of expression.
Researchers at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, may have found the solution. After an exhaustive look at word, syntax and punctuation patterns in written user-generated content, researchers Oren Tsur, Dmitry Davidov and Ari Rappoport constructed the Semi-Supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification, which is designed to recognize sarcasm in online sentences and assign each sentence to a sarcastic class (because some people are just a little bit sarcastic).
One idea is that automated sarcasm recognition could help improve review summarization and opinion-mining systems, since sarcasm’s subtlety and ambiguity sometimes make it hard even for humans to decide whether a comment is genuine or sarcastic. Identifying cues common to sarcasm in online communication (i.e., excessive capital letters and exclamation marks), the researchers created a complex algorithm in which a small number of sarcastic sentences “teach” the software to recognize sarcasm. They say the software precisely identifies sarcastic sentences 77 percent of the time.
Tsur, Davidov and Rappoport identified three factors that motivated reviewers to bust out the sarcasm: popularity - the more popular a product is, the more sarcastic comments it draws; simplicity - the simpler a product is, the more sarcastic comments it gets if it fails to fill its single function (i.e., noise-blocking/-canceling earphones that fail to block the noise); and price - the more a product costs, the more likely it is to attract sarcasm.
According to the study, the three most sarcastically-reviewed items on Amazon are Shure and Sony noise-canceling earphones, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Amazon’s own Kindle e-reader. Studies of user preferences also suggest some consumers find sarcastic reviews biased and less helpful.
Compulsively connected? Millennials can’t not social network
When consumers find something they put before sex, sleep and relieving themselves in the morning, a full-fledged obsession can’t be far behind. But unlike drinking, drugs and gambling, this addiction du jour is seemingly innocuous: checking in with their social networks. According to a study from Sunnyvale, Calif., electronics information company Retrevo Gadgetology, social networking has made junkies of Millennials, many of whom appear to be obsessed with staying connected to their Facebook and Twitter circles throughout the day and even the night. Fifty-six percent of social media users need to check Facebook at least once a day, and a further 12 percent show a compulsion to check in every couple of hours.
When asked if they check their Facebook or Twitter pages before going to bed, respondents were nearly split on the opposite ends of the spectrum, with 48 percent saying they check before bed, during the night or as soon as they wake up and 52 percent saying they never do this. After going to bed, respondents under age 25 were significantly more likely than their older counterparts to say that they check/update Facebook or Twitter any time they wake up (19 percent vs. 11 percent), sometimes (27 percent vs. 20 percent) or as soon as they wake up in the morning (32 percent vs. 21 percent).
Among social media users, it appears almost half are so involved with Facebook and Twitter that they check in the first thing in the morning, with 16 percent of social media users saying this is how they get their morning “news.” IPhone owners stand out in this study as more involved with social media; they use Facebook and Twitter more often and in more places.
Social media has been so integrated into daily life that many users don’t view electronic messages as a nuisance or interruption. When asked how they felt about being interrupted at various times and occasions, over 40 percent of respondents said they didn’t mind being interrupted for a message, 32 percent said a meal was not off-limits, and 7 percent said they’d even check out a message during an “intimate” moment. The percentage of Millennials who tolerate these types of social media-driven interruptions is nearly double that of 25+ respondents in all instances.