We propose a new way of eyes-free interaction for wearables. It is based on the user's proprioceptive sense, i.e., rather than seeing, hearing, or feeling an outside stimulus, users feel the pose of their own body.We have implemented a wearable device called Pose-IO that offers input and output based on proprioception. Users communicate with Pose-IO through the pose of their wrists. Users enter information by performing an input gesture by flexing their wrist, which the device senses using a 3-axis accelerometer. Users receive output from Pose-IO by finding their wrist posed in an output gesture, which Pose-IO actuates using electrical muscle stimulation. This mechanism allows users to interact with Pose-IO without visual or auditory senses, but through the proprioceptive sense alone.We developed three simple applications that demonstrate symmetric proprioceptive interaction, where input and output occur through the same limb, as well as asymmetric interaction, where input and output occur through different limbs. In a first user study, participants using a symmetric proprioceptive interface re-entered poses received from Pose-IO with an average accuracy of 5.8° despite the minimal bandwidth offered by the device. In a second, exploratory study, we investigated participants' emotional response to asymmetric proprioceptive interaction and the concept of the user's body serving as interface. Participants reported to enjoy the experience (mean= 4.6 out of 5).

Over the last few decades, the cooperative banking sector in Germany has steadily increased its market share at the expense of other types of banks. This outcome is surprising from the standpoint oftraditional economic thinking about cooperatives , which suggests that they are most appropriate for "backward" economies. We develop a model of cooperative banks that highlights the dual role of members as borrowers and lenders. We show that a shift in the median (hence pivotal) member of the cooperative from predominantly a borrower orientation toward a lender orientation causes the cooperative bank to shift its policy from underpricing credit toward the provision of competitively priced credit and deposit services. Together with a nationwide supporting infrastructure to capture scale and scope economies (the Verbund), the market-oriented policy of German cooperative banks today allows them to compete successfully with other banking groups.

Gender differences is a phenomenon around the world actively researched by social scientists. Traditionally, the data used to support such studies is manually obtained, often through surveys with volunteers. However, due to their inherent high costs because of manual steps, such traditional methods do not quickly scale to large-size studies. We here investigate a particular aspect of gender differences: preferences for venues. To that end, we explore the use of check-in data collected from Foursquare to estimate cultural gender preferences for venues in the physical world. For that, we first demonstrate that by analyzing the check-in data in various regions of the world we can find significant differences in preferences for specific venues between gender groups. Some of these significant differences reflect well-known cultural patterns. Moreover, we also gathered evidence that our methodology offers useful information about gender preference for venues in a given region in the real world. This suggests that gender and venue preferences observed may not be independent. Our results indicate that our proposed methodology could be a promising tool to support studies on gender preferences for venues at different spatial granularities around the world, being faster and cheaper than traditional methods, besides quickly capturing changes in the real world.

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