more on academic social networking

i was reading reading a paper today titled "No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, Religion and Techno-spiritual Practices" by Genevieve Bell.

before i get to the meat of my post, first i'll give an amusing quote (the paper is full of them):

In mid-January 2004, the Reuters news service flashed out the headline "No More Text Messages from Jesus" signaling the demise of a distinctive Finnish mobile service. According to the wire story, earlier that month, Ville Nurmi, the Ombudsman for Finland's mobile services and regulatory watchdog organization, shut down a mobile service provider that offered text messages from Jesus Christ. The company, which was not named in the proceedings, promised to answer people's prayer with a text message from Jesus [1]. This service, ruled spam through a complex set of maneuvers that included a determination that Jesus did not own a mobile phone, is but one manifestation of the increasing visible intersections of spiritual practice and technological development world wide.

ok, now for my point. i'm not going to comment on this paper, however i did take quite a few notes, and i wanted to store and compare my notes, maybe post them so others could see them.

there is no where you can easily do this now.

and i'm not just talking about posting comments -- then everyone who ever has a comment, even if it has been said, will post it again. rather, i'm thinking of something more along the lines of post and response. so first, you'd compose your notes on the paper, and they'd be stored as your private note in the academic social networking site (let's give it a name.. i'll think of a name for my hypothetical site soon enough). now, if you wanted to make the notes on this paper public, you could, but if you wanted to add them to a conversation about the paper, you'd click the "add to conversation" button. now, what this would NOT do is blindly add your comments to the end of some big list. instead, it would first show you similar comments and any responses to those comments.

why do i think this would be useful? personally, i've been doing some trading on td ameritrade, and they have a fantastic help system. if you have a question and can't find the answer, you can type in your question and have it sent to a representative. but before they send the question, they show you possible answers and ask you, "do these satisfy your needs?" about 75% of the time they do.

in this academic case, if you find a thread that satisfies your comments, you may not post; otherwise, you might follow-up on that thread. or you might just give some sort of props (a la yelp's "cool, helpful, etc.." links) to the original commenter or responder.

this mechanism is especially important for academic papers, where comments and responses are often quite detailed, and are written anyway (whether others have written something or not... though having these comments available and reading them first might generate better discussions). more generally, this is a technique that should be broadly applied online. sometimes when i want to post a comment on a highly-trafficked blog or digg or slashdot i first read through every single comment to find if my comment has already been stated. this is extremely inefficient -- there should be much better comment search (either via search, or automatic collapsing of comments that are similar so i can explore the unique things that have been said more quickly).

night at home

tonight raja and i stayed in and drank chardonnay and watched the L word. now, i haven't seriously had any chardonnay in quite a while; i went off chardonnay a while back because i just hated the way the smell knocked me over the head: "i'm chardonnay -- pay attention to me!"

however, my friend gave me a bottle a recently and so i decided i would give it a try. the big oak (vanilla) and creaminess flavors definitely hit my nose, and they were nice! i really enjoy this bottle. i'm back on the chardonnay bandwagon, at least for a bit.

now the L word: the show is about a bunch of lesbians living in los angeles. it has some interesting characters, but my overall feeling is that i could drop it at any moment. not compelling enough. i like how they did a bit more with shane in the 4th episode. hopefully they pursue that (i haven't made it past episode 4). i'm not liking the main couple, to be honest. but i'll continue with it for a bit.

uplifting quote on education

i've been down a bit of late on my phd program. sigh. anyway, i read this line by the times magazine ethicist, randy cohen, and it brightened my day:

Education is meant to help us examine even our fundamental beliefs -- this can be disorienting, perhaps, but not as unhealthful as silence and obscurity.

you can find the whole commentary here.

cute butts and housework

in the new york times magazine this week, annie murphy paul examines the societal effects of the trend for marriages to be increasingly between people with similar incomes. the article looks at some recent research analyzing this trend, and is informative in that regard. however, the title and byline are ridiculous and inflammatory, a noticeable trend in the times magazine of late: "The Real Marriage Penalty: Husbands and wives are increasingly likely to have similar incomes. Is a more divided society the result?"

then again, catchy bylines are what news editors cut their teeth on.

more interesting is a quote in the article that says women today may be looking for "'cute butts and housework' -- that is, a man with an appealing physique and a willingness to wash dishes." when i read this, i thought to myself, "hmm, i'm lagging. i can do dishes, but who can't?"

ucla student tasered

john told me about a recent, horrific incident involving the police and a student at ucla. the student was in the library after 11pm. at ucla, they can do random checks on people in libraries after 11pm to ensure that they are students. this student was asked for his id, but he felt he was being targeted because of his middle eastern descent. so he refused to provide his id, and refused to leave. when the library called in the campus police, things went crazy. the student was repeatedly tasered (5 times) even though he was not putting up any active resistance. the la times has a good summary of the incident.

there's a youtube video showing parts of the tasering, though what's happening is not always clear (but the student's shouts of pain are quite clear). below i've embedded a youtube video made by a local news station. they extract the key parts of the video and get some commentary from those involved.



my feeling: this is insane. there was no reason to use a taser on this student. sure, he was being an idiot and a jerk. but this video is a great example of excessive force. the students surrounding the officers seem scared out of their minds -- this just shouldn't happen.

bank of america jails fraud victim; victim fights back

i found this on boing boing.

matthew shinnick sold his bike and received a check from the buyer that was for much more than the agreed upon price. suspicious, he went to his local bank of america branch to ask if the check was real and if the account had sufficient funds. the teller found that the account had sufficient funds and so shinnick decided to cash it. when the teller began that process, she found that there was a fraud alert on the account and that the check was in fact fake. things went crazy from that point:

From SFGate, Check from a scammer bounces victim into jail:

The teller contacted the business and was informed that no check had been written to Shinnick for $2,000 or any other amount. She immediately passed the check to the branch manager. "I saw him talking on the phone and staring at me," Shinnick said. "A few minutes later, four SFPD officers came into the bank. They didn't say a thing. They just kicked my legs apart and handcuffed me behind my back." The police report for Shinnick's arrest says he was taken into custody "for the safety of the bank employees as well as the bank customers."

shinnick had to pay thousands to get himself out of jail and clear his name, and bank of america refused to reimburse him. so he went to a consumer advocate radio host, and this host implored his listeners to close their bank of america accounts and let him know how much money they removed from bank of america. so far, the consumer advocate says $50 million has been removed from bank of america because of this incident.

this is crazy. i closed my bank of america account years ago because of their awful customer service, but this arrest takes things to the next level. there must be a better procedure for dealing with these problems. indeed, a few questions could have cleared things up. he could've more clearly indicated his suspicion that the check might be fraudulent, and was given to him as part of a transaction. was this kind of response really necessary?

the coffee shop

i used to dislike coffee shops as places to work, but that has changed. recently i've been accomplishing quite a few things at my local coffee shop, coffee to the people. i have some ideas concerning why this might be.

first, i don't think i ever gave coffee shops enough of a chance. the noise isn't distracting, in fact, i feel quite at peace in the coffee shop. no one is going to interrupt me, and if they do, it will almost surely be something very quick. furthermore, the coffee shop disabuses me of my bad habits, like browsing the web (i don't take my laptop) and putzing around with things in my room (like my squeezebox). in fact, i think i actually get more done than i would in my room or office at school, because the distant hubbub of the coffee shop is actually energizing.

i'm going to continue with coffee shops and see what other magic they might inspire.

some links:

1. this guy might have the right idea about the coffee shop buzz
2. this book isn't exactly on topic, but it discusses the "third place," where people can have a good time and hangout and converse
3. i think this might be going to far: Lexmark transforms Toronto coffee shop into small office for Small Business Week

Sale Starts Tomorrow

i saw this digg post on windows vista titled "Windows Vista GOING GOLD TOMORROW"

going gold means that the final version of the software is ready to ship. no more code changes. now, microsoft has been saying this for a long time (though i think this time they actually mean it). but in any case, this reminds me of a story my father told me about a store in india.

outside the store there's a sign that says "Sale Starts Tomorrow." of course, that might get you interested to go in and check things out. so you go in, see some things you like, and then wonder, "will i actually come back tomorrow, or should i just get them now?" so you buy them now.

the trick is, the same sign is always outside. the sale is always starting tomorrow.

now, i'm not sure how this makes regular customers feel. maybe they just get a laugh out of it after a while. i think it's quite amusing.

doubt

doubt, a feeling i'm sure we all have had, is also the name of a play that met rave reviews in new york city. it's now playing in san francisco, and i had the opportunity to see it tonight, on its opening night. it stars the fantastic cherry jones (pictured above in character), who really steals the show.

here's a blurb about jones and the show from the chronicle:

In the 90 minutes Cherry Jones spends onstage as Sister Aloysius, in John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "Doubt," she inhabits a deeply dimensioned space of fierce will, spiritual righteousness, crinkly humor, granitic isolation and blinding determination backlit by an existential unease. It's all played out in a lean psychological thriller about the fictional principal of a New York Catholic school in 1964 and the priest she accuses of "interfering" sexually with a male student. The play, featuring Jones' eagerly awaited San Francisco debut, opens this week at the Golden Gate Theatre for a four-week run.

it's playing at the golden gate theatre in san francisco for 4 weeks. check out the official website, which has a nice video about the show.

the play is only 90 minutes, but it hits on a lot of ideas and makes you think. my take away was a lot of thought on despair, loneliness, and, of course, doubt. it's very well written.

highly recommended!

academic social networking

have you ever tried to navigate a professor's web site? or connect papers between people, and figure out who's working on what? or tried to figure out if a professor is around, working on X, or completely incognito?

academic work is very public, as it should be. these days, you can find most papers online, as well as many courses and teaching materials. yet there is little sense of presence online. furthermore, the online academic world is supremely disorganized.

now, don't get me wrong: there's lots of academic work available online (google scholar is quite a good source, as well as various publishers). but what about the connections? between the works, between the peoples, through time... and what about evaluation? that seems hidden.

here are some questions you might ask of an academic: what are you working on now? who are your students? what are they working on? what do you think of paper P? can you give me a list of reading material that would provide sufficient background for your paper on doodads?

it's unlikely you would get a timely answer. you might eventually get a good answer.

so i was wondering why there isn't a good network site for academic information, and for academics and researchers? it could be a social networking site, but it would also be a public place for browsing and searching, because after all, academic production is supposed to be public. furthermore, much academic data is online, just waiting to be surfaced more effectively. for instance, if we think of the social networking possibilities for a moment, consider that many academics have a web page, where they list all their publications, as well as their students. couldn't we build a resource that simply effectively connects these pages, people, and papers? and what if we let people contribute directly to this resource? what if we tried to build a community around it? there's a cite called rexa that's supposed to do some of this for the computer science community (their slogan is "Research * People * Connections"), but i can only tell you how poor it is because to find out for yourself would require signing up and logging in, and who wants to do that?

what about a service for effectively publishing, detecting, and supplementing the act of doing background research on a topic? building communities around papers and people? there's some work in tagging for the academic domain, see citeulike

why haven't many academics got in on the online video craziness? are they that far behind?

i tried to see if others had commented on the lack of such spaces online. i found one blog post, with some good ideas.

i have a whole 2 or 3 pages of notes of ideas around this... as a graduate student, as an observer of research getting done (and not getting done), i can see the potential for something in this space. anyway, i may do something about this if i get riled up enough.

Squeezebox: great music, easy access

that's me, trying to kiss my newest music gadget, the squeezebox. the squeezebox can wirelessly connect to your computer, or directly to the internet, and stream music. you connect the squeezebox to some speakers and you've got a sweet setup.

it comes with a fantastic remote, and so i was sittin back on my bed, browsing the internet world of music. first i found an all 80s radio station, then i jumped to a dance station out of amsterdam. then i wanted to do more directed exploration, so i used the remote to key "justin timberlake" into the radio's pandora interface, and it made me a JT station. oh, and there's a software interface for your computer (both offline and online) so you can configure your music tastes from your computer, as well as from the device directly.

now, i've only had this for an hour or so, but i'm already loving it.

what inspired me to buy this slick little device? pandora. if you haven't seen pandora, you really need to check it out. pandora's musicologists have characterized tens of thousands of songs, and so you enter a band or song into their system and it will connect you with similar songs. you create "stations" around your favorite bands or songs.

UPDATE: i just encountered two small downers. after 90 days, to continue the pandora connection i need to pay $36 annually. that's actuallly not that much money, but still.. the other thing is that pandora seems to limit the number of skip-to-next-tracks i can do in an hour. that's annoying. still, i'm enjoying myself. it brings me back to the day when my sister had a stereo in her room, and sometimes i'd go in and just put in a cd and browse that or the radio. except now i have a lot more options, and can do directed exploration, not just random wandering.

sketch comedy: elephant larry

one of my roommates from college, neal, was in a sketch comedy troupe at school. when some of his peeps graduated and movd to nyc, they formed their own sketch comedy group called elephant larry (i wonder if they chose that name partly because it would google well). i like their work and so wanted to let all my the readers know about them.

anyway, neal told me his friends were recently invited to film a sketch in la with john landis, the director of animal house and blues brothers. impressive stuff. a few other sketch troupes were also invited. anyway, you can see their sketch called "Tall Cop, Short Cop" here (note that the link has been a bit flaky... stupid jibjab). the sketch starts a bit slowly, but gets quite funny.

i also found some of their stuff on youtube. i think this commercial is the best:

ah japan

i was browsing around flickr and saw this sunset in tokyo.


i really enjoyed japan, and wish i was there longer. i remember doing karaoke with halldor in hakodate -- i actually have a video of halldor in action singing "it wasn't me" by shaggy.

but that video is not online, and couldn't be without halldor's consent, so instead i'll give you the original video. just imagine replacing shaggy in this video with an icelander named halldor.

nobel peace prize, bangladesh and global warming

i've been reading about the nobel peace prize winner mohammad yunus. in case you didn't know, dr. yunus started the grameen bank, a bank for the poor in bangladesh. he pushed the idea of microcredit. i actually saw him give a talk a while back, and it was very inspiring. here are some quotes from speeches he's given:

We believe that poverty does not belong to a civilized
human society. It belongs to museums.

...

All human beings have an innate skill - survival skill. The
fact that poor are still alive is a proof of their ability
to survive. We do not need to teach them how to survive.
They know this already.

--Dr. Mohammad Yunus

i was reminded of this because of the startling thing larry brilliant said about global warming when speaking at berkeley months back. he lauded dr. yunus' work but stated that it could literally be washed away by the rising sea levels due to global warming. the picture below gives a sense of this scary possibility. follow this link for more.

Pie Eating Contest at Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival

we went to the half moon bay pumpkin festival this past weekend. the traffic getting there was horrible but it was worth it, just to see small children compete in a pie eating contest. watch this video, and see the boy 2nd or 3rd from the left bang his head into the pie. watch the little girl at the right devour the pie.



these kids are amazing. i would've completely flopped in this activity (and hence i didn't engage in the adult pie-eating contest).

now to get me some pumpkin pie...

malcolm gladwell on predicting hit movies

i was at the new yorker festival last weekend and malcolm gladwell spoke about predicting hit movies. i'm not sure how you feel about mr gladwell (my friend niniane is none-too-impressed with him), but whatever you think, he's a fantastic storyteller.

i wasn't going to post about this until wednesday, because that's when the new yorker is posting the video of gladwell's presentation online (scroll to the bottom of the new yorker page), but then i saw that the article is actually online, scanned in by the company that gladwell is talking about in his article. if you read my blog, you know how annoyed i am with the new yorker not making their material more readily available, so here i am, happy to point you to it.

very briefly, gladwell is writing about a group of people who believe they can predict the amount of money a movie will make, just by analyzing the screenplay and feeding some data into an elaborate computer program. they actually do quite well, supposedly. the talk is amazing, and i haven't read the article yet, but you should read it just to learn about mr pink and mr brown, two movie analysts who are very serious about reading screenplays:

Mr. Brown couldn’t remember a single script he’d read where he thought there wasn’t room for improvement, and Mr. Pink, when asked the same question, could come up with just one: “Lethal Weapon.” “A friend of mine gave me the shooting script before it came out, and I remember reading it and thinking, It’s all there. It was all on the page."

convict smooth talks his way out of arrest

hi all,

i want to post about my experience at the new yorker festival, but i haven't gotten around to writing it up. instead, i just want to post this video, which is rather amazing. the man being questioned by the police officer in this video had just escaped from a high-security prison a few hours earlier. he had escaped from prison numerous times, and is essentially an escape expert (he's also a convicted murderer). anyway, the video is worth watching, especially to see how smooth the convict is, and how dumb the cop is.

there's nothing quite like paper

i've been watching battlestar galactica lately and i love it. it's so much better than star trek. besides the obvious benefit to having a long storyline (as opposed to one-off episodes which certainly get tiring), i really enjoy how the portrayal is not so super hitech to the point of stupidity.

for instance, they use paper. this might not seem like much, but think back to any star trek tv show or movie you have ever seen -- did you ever see paper anywhere? highly unlikely. it did crop up, very rarely, and probably with the clear hint that the people using the paper were archaic, or the paper was super old.

now think about how useful paper is -- you can scrunch it up, it can be folded, you can drop your coffee on it, you can shove it in your pocket, it's super-high resolution, marking it is really easy...

what did they use on star trek? those clunky looking pads. and did you ever see anyone tuck that pad away in their pocket? no, they didn't have pockets, and even if they did, where would it fit?

i assure you the future will have paper.

the design of everyday things

i recently purchased the design of everyday things by don norman. norman is a cognitive scientist who has thought a lot about design of everyday things. before i tell my own frustrating story of a poorly designed everyday thing, here are some quotes:

The book begins with one of don's amusing experiences:

"You would need an engineering degree from MIT to work this," someone once told me, shaking his head in puzzlement over his brand new digital watch. Well, I have an engineering degree from MIT... Give me a few hours and I can figure out the watch. But why should it take hours?

norman then nicely generalizes to exactly what i'm feeling:

Why do we put up with the frustrations of everyday objects, with objects that we can't figure out how to use, with those neat plastic wrapped packages that seem impossible to open, with doors that trap people, with washing machines and dryers that have become too confusing to use...

and he gives this simple rule which i like:

1. It's not your fault: If there is anything that has caught the popular fancy, it is this simple idea: when people have trouble with something, it isn't their fault -- it's the fault of the design. Every week brings yet another letter or e-mail from someone thanking me for delivering them from their feeling of incompetence.

now my story. my roommate has this great can opener: it cuts the can just below the top, and you just pull off the top. no jagged metal, no problems. well, almost, when you know how to use it.

anyway, i had been shown how to work it 1 or 2 times, and i needed to open some soup. no one was around, i couldn't ask questions. well, i tried every which way to get this can opener on with no success. i'm not sure how i opened that can, but i remember there being jagged edges and me just having a very frustrating experience with the whole thing. i remember wanting to throw the can and shout very loudly after that experience. opening a can should not be this hard.

i concluded that this can opener was very poorly designed because if you were a new user, you wouldn't be able to just pick it up and use it. you'd be lucky if you could. finally, on the 3rd or 4th time of seeing it function, i saw the key ingredient that showed me how to line everything up. now using the can opener is great, but what a ridiculous learning experience.

on the flip side, i came across another can opener months later, and i opened a can with it almost immediately. no one had to show me anything, and yet this wasn't your standard can opener: it also cut in a different way, and left no sharp edges. it was effortless. this second can opener was well-designed. no everyday thing should be very difficult to use for the typical consumer.

follow this link to find out more about norman and his design philosophy.

biking: be visible and predictable

this past weekend i went to a free, 4 hour classroom course on bike safety. i want to get into biking and want to do it safely here in san francisco, so i thought a class on safety would be a good start. the class was offered by the san francisco bicycle coalition, and it was fantastic.

this article from 2005 in the sf chronicle gives a good overview of what i learned (in fact, my instructor is quoted in the article). i want to emphasize one quote, because when i rode a bike in palo alto for a summer i did not do this at all, and neither did many bikers on the road:

Ride like a car: A baseline concept is taken from an old manual, "Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles." This creates visibility and predictability for cyclists. They signal, obey traffic laws, and when they need to do so, take over a lane.

the key point here is being visible and predictable. i was always afraid to drive out in the car lane, or two close to moving cars but in fact most bicycle accidents happen when the cyclist is too close to parked cars, or moves in an erratic manner. moving cars will avoid cyclists and do a good job of it if the cyclist is acting predictably.

this saturday i have the second day of my course, which is out on the road. i'm afraid, because it's one thing to say this and listen to it, it's another thing to implement it on the road. i'm in a state of intimidation right now, which hopefully i can overcome:

"An urban cyclist goes through three stages," says Bert Hill, who teaches clinics for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition at police stations around the city.

"First, you're intimidated. You try to find out rules and follow them," Hill said. "The second occurs when you gain some mastery, and discover freedom of movement. But that can grow a little too heady, and lead to mistakes. The third follows all that, after you realize you are an ambassador for cycling. What you do changes the world where you ride."