Eye-TrackingTop of Mind with Julie Rose • Season 1, Episode 165, Segment 4
Oct 26, 2015 • 17m
Guest: Kevin John, PhD, Professor of Communications at BYU  Have you noticed that you don’t see as many ads along the borders of your Facebook feed lately? Maybe you haven’t because, it turns out, people really weren’t paying much attention to those ads in the first place. Which is why Facebook is shifting ads to appear in the stream of news you’re your friends. Those “sponsored” messages that look like a standard post, but are really a paid ad. And for that, you can thank eye-tracking research. Rather than survey people about what they noticed in an ad, media researchers can now just put people in front of a webpage and use infrared cameras to see where their eyes linger, and then adjust accordingly.

Bridge InspectionOct 26, 201522mGuests: Spencer Guthrie, PhD, Professor of Civil Engineering at BYU; Brian Mazzeo, PhD, Electrical Engineering Professor at BYU; Spencer Rogers of BYU’s Technology Transfer Office  Do you cross a bridge on your daily commute? The Federal Highway Administration this year said some 61,000 bridges across the country structurally deficient and needing repair. You might be in one of the 215 million vehicles crossing that cross over those bridges every day. There is a national program to address those deficiencies, but one of the challenges in knowing whether a bridge needs repair is knowing what’s going on beneath the surface: Down inside the concrete, where deterioration might be underway long before it’s visible on top.
Guests: Spencer Guthrie, PhD, Professor of Civil Engineering at BYU; Brian Mazzeo, PhD, Electrical Engineering Professor at BYU; Spencer Rogers of BYU’s Technology Transfer Office  Do you cross a bridge on your daily commute? The Federal Highway Administration this year said some 61,000 bridges across the country structurally deficient and needing repair. You might be in one of the 215 million vehicles crossing that cross over those bridges every day. There is a national program to address those deficiencies, but one of the challenges in knowing whether a bridge needs repair is knowing what’s going on beneath the surface: Down inside the concrete, where deterioration might be underway long before it’s visible on top.