Sometimes I Wish That It Would Rain Here

barking up the wrong (digital) tree

2011-08-03T09:30:00.001-07:00

just saw this and I couldn't resist commenting.

apparently, DARPA is soliciting proposals for research that will help security and intelligence officials use social media (read: Facebook and Twitter) identify rebellious intent, predict mass public action, etc. OK, not a particularly new story, even if they are sinking $42 million into it.

what's interesting here is the implication, present in so much research on social media, that social media = reality. if it's on the internet, it must be true. for example, consider the 2004 Howard Dean primary campaign. Dean had a huge following on the internet, and, going into the Iowa caucus, many predicted him as the frontrunner. however, he ended up finishing a distant third and soon thereafter dropping out of the primaries (no doubt in part due to the media reaction to the Dean scream). what happened? the exuberance Dean's supporters showed online was not representative of the general voters in the Democratic party, or at least not those at the Iowa caucus. since these other voters were not part of the online political scene, it would have been hard for analysis of online content to determine that the Deaniacs were likely a minority.

granted, this is a bit of a simplification, and I'm choosing here to focus on a particular, limited portion of the account. the point, though, is that online furor and enthusiasm does not necessarily translate to impact and action. yes, there are certainly numerous interesting examples of being able to predict everything from election results to movie ratings based on social media content and activity, and the Pentagon seems to hope to expand this predictive power to issues of national security. however, it seems equally if not more important to attend to when, why, and how such predictions prove inaccurate, especially when we're talking about suspicions of political unrest or even terrorism.

When the Implication Is Not to Design - Discussion

2011-06-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

(cross-posted from my academic/professional site)

Last month, I presented a paper at CHI titled When the Implication Is Not to Design (Technology). This paper was intended primarily to facilitate a conversation, so my co-author and I are organizing a discussion on the sustainable-chi mailing list. We'd like to invite you to join the discussion. Below is a copy of the post starting the discussion.

Last month at CHI, there was a paper by myself and Six Silberman titled When the Implication Is Not to Design (Technology). The basic premise is that there are some situations where a technological intervention may not be the most appropriate. The paper provides specific ways of articulating when this may be the case, as well as practical recommendations for applying this perspective. Copies are available at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1978942.1979275 or http://ericbaumer.com/publications/impl9-rev.pdf.

We would like to take this opportunity to solicit comments and critiques. This paper was intended first and foremost to be part of a conversation, and we believe that some of that conversation should happen here on the sustainable-chi list. We hope that members of the general HCI community will join us in this discussion.

~Eric and Six

how many is too many?

2011-06-13T05:27:00.000-07:00

"The earth is full." Or so the NYT writer suggests, citing a new book from Paul Gilding about "Why Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World," as well as work by the Global Footprint Network suggesting that current consumptive rates require 1.5 times the earth's resources (i.e., 1.5 earths) to be sustainable. there are two major points from this article on which I'd like to comment.

first, this excellent point:

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

right on. this is not the first commentary to suggest that the growth-based capitalist approach is simply not viable. I do appreciate, however, the suggestion of an alternative, an (economic) model based on happiness, or perhaps on joy or fulfillment. there are a couple challenges here, though.

first, happiness or (or self-actualization or what have you) are not easily measurable in a traditional quantifiable manner (gross national happiness meter not withstanding). this nice thing about money is that you can count it, and it's much harder to build a model, economic, or otherwise, based on something that's difficult (if not impossible) to count.

second, I appreciate the vision of a "happiness-driven growth model." even if it were clear what such a model looked like, I wonder, how do we get from here to there? that is, how do we effect the transition from a consumption-driven model to a happiness-driven model? visions are nice, but actionable incremental steps seem, at least to me, vital to any real social change.

third, I wonder about the ways in which knowledge, and wisdom and understand, about how to be happy (or joyful, etc.) gets passed on. while the article linked above seems to suggest that the change will come rapidly and wholly, I suspect this kind of a socio-cultural-economic shift may instead take many generations to occur. modern society has done a fantastic job of passing on certain types of knowledge, mostly those that can be explicated in writing (scientific, technical, academic, etc.). however, we're not as good, at least it seems to me, at passing on experiential, tacit, or lived knowledge. in some ways, this is reminiscent of Quinn's argument about takers and leavers, but I think it cuts very deeply to fundamental questions not only about how we know that we know what we know (i.e., epistemological questions, questions of knowledge production), but also questions about knowledge transference and understanding. perhaps, a change to a happiness-driven model might be predicated on a change that incorporates and appreciates multiple ways of knowing into modern society.

the second major point on which I'd like to comment is this question of the number of earths required to sustain current practices. it seems as if most work along these lines asks, essentially, given the number of people and our current ways of living, how many earths would it take to sustain us? when the answer is greater than one, the response is often that we should change our ways of living. that is almost certainly the case, but is it the whole story? is it possible that we should perhaps also entertain the notion that the reason we need more than one earth's worth of resources is because there are simply too many people for one earth? this is a very difficult (if not impossible) question to answer. however, sometimes answering the question is not as important as asking it, and I often wish that this question were asked more often.

unparticipation

2010-11-02T08:12:00.000-07:00

while reading this article on the impacts of public deliberation forums, I saw included just below the abstract a most fantastic keyword: zen participation. "whoa!" I thought, "this article is going to be more awesome than I thought."

alas, this apparently novel keyword was really just the result of a typographic idiosyncrasy. the keyword citizen participation had been hyphenated, such that citi- was on one line and zen participation on the next. still a cool article, just not about zen. nonetheless, it's fun to think about what zen participation might look like...

are we making each other stupid?

2010-09-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

communication technologies change, and along with those technological changes come cognitive changes. for example, Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy describes how the technology of writing (and then later, of print) had deep and far reaching cognitive, cultural, and social impacts.

it's not hard to extend this logic to more recent communication technologies, e.g., the internet. I recently came across Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, as well as his 2008 essay (which I presume was a forerunner to the book), Is Google Making Us Stupid? I've not yet read the book, but the essay's basic premise is that the communication medium (in a McLuhan sense of the term) of the internet discourages deep, thoughtful, reflective reading or contemplation, and it encourages frenetic switching between activities that only enables engagement at a shallow level. he connects these ideas to initial fears about Gutenberg's printing press, and even back to Plato's Phaedrus, in which he warns against the weakness of mind that will be encouraged by a society dependent upon writing (though, interestingly, he doesn't mention Ong's work along these lines).

in some ways, I share Carr's concern for how communication and information technologies reshape human cognition. I, too, worry about losing a space for quiet, thoughtful contemplation and reflection. granted, my interest is a bit more empirical, in understanding exactly what impacts such technologies have, and how they unfold. on the other hand, I felt that Carr's essay was missing an important piece of the puzzle: social interaction. communication technologies are used not only to gather information, but also to communicate with other people. focusing on information technologies reshape how we think, while certainly important, may distract from the ways in which they reshape how we interact.

data information knowledge wisdom

2010-07-01T14:41:00.000-07:00

in my continuing quest to understand my own field, I've previously blogged about definitions of informatics. one such definition is that it is "the process of, or the study of the process of, transforming data into information." of course, this gets into tricky question about what constitutes "data" and "information," but for now I'll leave that to this rather old post.

turns out, some folks have argued that this data-to-information process is only one step in a larger trajectory. generally this goes somethings like the following (partially cribbed from the DIKW Wikipedia article, partially from an alternative hierarchy, and partially my synopsis/interpretation):

data - representations of direct observations of the world.
information - data assembled to answer specific "who," "what," "when," and "where" style questions. I might call this, "data made meaningful."
knowledge - the application of information for the accomplishment of a specific purpose, answers "how" questions. I might call this, "data and information made useful."
wisdom - understanding the significance and value of knowledge, answers "why" questions. I might call this, "data, information, and knowledge made valuable."

now, I don't think this is a particularly good categorization of how the world works, or how we work in the world. the Wikipedia article linked above has some pretty good discussion about how these various terms (data, information, knowledge, wisdom, etc.) might be so ambiguous, or polysemous, as to be not particularly useful. however, I think these sorts of hierarchies and typologies are interesting from a rhetorical/critical standpoint, as a way of understanding how different groups of people talk about and thinking about such topics as information and understanding.

this interlude was prompted by the ever-provocative Virtual Politik. now, back to work (in this case, grant writing).

twittering a plenary

2010-04-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

while I signed up for Twitter a while ago, I haven't really been a super active user. during the closing plenary at CHI 2010 (Noel Sharkey presenting about "Doing What's Right with Robots: An Ethical Appraisal"), I decided to try Twittering the event live and following others' tweets with #chi2010 (which, at the time of this posting, is largely focused around the efforts of Europeans to get home despite the Icelandic volcano eruption). I'll admit that I ended intended to go into snark mode (I mean, c'mon, robots and ethics? what was I supposed to expect?), but the talk turned out mostly pretty decent, so I ended striving more in the direction of thoughtful commentary. it was an interesting process, though it didn't really go very much as I had expected.

first, I was rather surprised that most of the tweets were pretty much restatements or summaries of high points in the talk. I suppose most people imagined (accurately or otherwise, I don't know) that the majority of their followers were not in the room, such that simply conveying the high points of the talk to those not present was valuable (apparently, the resulting stream was rather high quality). it's also possible that people were using their Twitter streams more as a means of taking notes for themselves than as a means of having a conversation with anyone. there were a couple who had some good insight (@ayman and @beki70 among them), many of which occurred around Sharkey's horrible handling of an important question about gender (he probably didn't realize that there'd been a presentation on Feminist HCI (paper)). I was rather amused by the couple times someone made a typo and wrote Shirkey instead of Sharkey, though the idea of the former giving a keynote on robots and ethics did make me laugh.

I was also interested to discover the existence of "fake" accounts for prominent researchers in the area, e.g., @clampefake, @fakeedchi, and @fakeedwardtufte. I didn't know these existed. not quite sure what people are/were doing with them and what the motivations are other than insinuating, tongue firmly placed in cheek, that Tufte goes on and on about embellishments (I kept waiting for the ghost Twitterer to link to Tufte's more violent side, but alas, s/he did not).

most surprising, though, is that I didn't feel like there were really that many tweets. maybe most folks were just paying more attention to the talk. maybe other people had been Twittering during the earlier talks and their batteries were all dead. maybe following #chi2010 would have been more useful during the other parallel sessions of the conference, when the simple reports of what speakers were saying in other rooms would have been valuable. it's hard to say, but I honestly expected to see many more tweets from a room of ~2000-something people.

ultimately, what was the value? I had expected some interesting and thoughtful insights from others, potentially leading to valuable discussions (in as much as Twitter can be a platform for discussion). and while there was some of that (as noted above), it was a little less than I expected. in contrast to Ed Chi's summary about the value of Twitter during conferences, the most useful thing for me ended up being (I think) the visibility, both in terms of getting a bunch of new followers (hi everyone, and thanks!) and finding new people to follow (hello to you, too!). again, not that it was bad (rather the opposite), it just wasn't exactly as I had expected.

twitter following study

2010-03-10T08:43:00.000-08:00

I'm currently conducting a study of following on Twitter. in the process of recruiting participants, more than a couple people have asked for a non-PDF version of the recruitment information, so here it is.

---

Do You Use Twitter? Join Research about Following on Twitter

Requirements:
- A regular user of Twitter or other microblogging service (such as Jaiku) – must be following at least 5 other users
- Can participate in phone/Skype interview, or lives near Orange County, CA
- Owns a personal computer
- Age of 18 or over

The purpose of this research is to investigate how people follow and interact on Twitter and other microblogs. Participation in this research will involve in-person interviews every 4 to 6 weeks lasting through Spring of 2010, and possibly one or more group interviews. There is no risk to participants and involvement can be ended at any time. Participants will be entered in a drawing for a $100 Amazon.com gift card at the end of the research period. Participants’ privacy and rights will be completely protected. Participation is completely voluntary and may be discontinued at any time.

If interested contact:
Lead Researcher
Eric P. S. Baumer: ebaumer@uci.edu
Department of Informatics
University of California, Irvine

Co-Researcher
Allison Leis: aleis@uci.edu

Faculty Sponsor
Bill Tomlinson

activism for activism: the necessary locality of tactical knowledge

2010-03-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

yesterday, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb interviewed Mary Joyce about the founding of her new meta-activism project. the idea is, in short, that most activist strategies were based on social and technological (technosocial?) conditions before the advent of mass digital communication. however, these strategies must be radically altered to enable what's being called digital activism. the focus of the meta-activism project, then, is to provide potential digital activists with the knowledge, tools, and tactics necessary to make full use of these novel technologies.

this seems like a rather sensible goal, depending on how it's accomplished. yes, it makes sense that tools for digital activism require new strategies and tactics; to some extent, this is the "more is different" argument about digital/social media. however, it seems that such tactics would also need to be grounded in local contexts. the same digital activism tactics that work with incredible efficacy in, say, Iran may fail entirely in Egypt, or the US, or anywhere else. I feel that a major portion of this project should be focused on situating digital activism in local cultural, political, social, and historical contexts, and on understanding how those contexts interrelated with the success or failure of given efforts.

speaking of success and failure, in the interview, Mary is pretty candid about how effective this digital activism has been, noting that "few cases of digital activism are actual successes." she goes further, noting the difficulty of even assessing success. is a campaign successful if it mobilizes a sufficient number of people (in which cases, what constitutes a sufficient number)? is it successful if it achieves its stated goal? by either criterion, few such campaigns succeed, and it's only a minute portion that achieve success in the latter terms of actually affecting change. this brings up a point I've wondered about often: why do some online social movements succeed, and why do some fail? there have been tons of studies of success stories, but I feel like these need to be complemented with studies of the failures, perhaps focusing on campaigns that succeeded in mobilizing large numbers of people but still failed to achieve their goals (if anyone knows of such work, feel free to point me in the right direction).

another point Mary made caught my attention. she described how, for a digital technology to be highly useful, it needs both scale and "use neutrality" (even she uses scare quotes around that phrase). by scale, she means simply that there must be a critical mass of users (again, what constitutes a "critical mass" is likely a topic for some debate). by "use neutral," she means that the technology "can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files." she cites YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter as use neutral, while she says LastFM and Bloglines are not.

I think I have to disagree with use neutrality, both on a terminological level and on a conceptual level. first, none of the tools she has described are use neutral; each is designed for a specific set of use cases. Twitter is not conducive to long, thoughtful, complex argumentation in a way that blogger would be. Facebook cannot host videos the way that YouTube can. however, I will admit that LastFM has a much more focused, constrained set of use cases than, say, Facebook. furthermore, these tools are anything but neutral. the ontological categories invoked by tools such as Facebook (friends, networks, feeds, etc.) privilege a certain type of configuration between the individual and society, and arguing that these tools have use neutrality distracts from the social, political, and cultural (not to mention philosophical and epistemological) commitments made in their design.

I think the point is not that these tools have "use neutrality," but rather "use plasticity." that is, while a tool such as Facebook or Twitter has a certain intended use, the tool is flexible enough, plastic enough, that it can be adapted to serve a variety of purposes in a variety of contexts. and again, we're back to what I think is the crux of the interesting issue here: how are these various tools repurposed and adapted to local contexts, and how do those processes of repurposing and adaptation change the tool (and, reflexively, the context) in ways that enable a digital activism campaign to succeed (or prevent it from succeeding)? synthesizing across different instances of the interplay between the plasticity of digital/social media seems like it could be a highly advantageous approach for enabling efforts such as the meta-activism project to make a real, significant contribution to understanding digital activism.

alternative carbon footprint calculators

2010-03-02T11:04:00.000-08:00

how do you determine your impact on climate change? perhaps you use a carbon calculator, a nifty tool that asks for a bunch of stats about how you live your life and spits out a number indicating how many tonnes of CO2 are released as a result of your activities. the less CO2, the less your environmental impact. or at least, that's the theory.

I've been thinking about these carbon footprint calculators quite a bit recently, since some folks in my research group have been working on the Better Carbon Calculator. the premise is that filling in all the details about yourself necessary to calculate your carbon footprint--your home energy bill, how much you drive, your car's gas mileage, how much you fly, how often you buy new clothes, how much meat you eat, etc.--is not only tedious, but many people don't have that info ready at hand. Better Carbon uses collaborative filtering to make best guesses; think Netflix's movie recommendation system, only for your consumption patterns. don't know how much meat you eat? chances are you eat just about as much meat as other people who are like you. if you know you happen to eat less meat (e.g., you're vegan) or more meat (e.g., you're a body builder trying to bulk up), you simply change the suggested defaults. pretty clever.

however, most carbon calculators (including Better Carbon) are about individual behaviors, specifically, individual consumption choices. however, there are lots of things you do other than buy/eat/consume stuff that impacts the environment. what about a system that could calculate the carbon footprint of a vote? based on the legislation for which senator so-and-so has voted and her/his position on upcoming bills, your vote for that senator has the following carbon footprint. you could envision similar tools for domains. what's the carbon footprint of my 401k, based on the companies in which I'm invested? what's the carbon footprint of an average semester's tuition at a given university? what's the carbon footprint of my health insurance? the idea here is to get people thinking at scales beyond individual consumption patterns and considering alternative community, organizational, and/or political means of enacting environmentally sustainable decisions.

in some ways, this could be a useful exercise. on the other hand, carbon footprint is only a small component of one's larger environmental footprint, and can be somewhat opaque at that. what does it mean that I cause 13.39 tonnes of CO2 per year? even if that's better than most people near me or in my peer group, is it sustainable in the long run? is tonnes of CO2 even a sensible figure on which to focus? granted, greenhouse gas emissions are a major contributor to climate change, which is probably one of the most pressing environmental issues, but it's certainly not the only issue. footprint calculators are nice, because they make readily quantifiable one's impact. however, they also distract from the complexities behind why some actions are more sustainable than others and thus, I argue, don't do a great deal to help foster debate about improving the situation.

(acknowledgment: many of these thoughts were highly influenced by insightful conversations with Paul, Six, Catherine, Bill, Joel, and many others)

what is informatics? grad student party definitions

2010-02-16T16:50:00.000-08:00

a recent CACM article describes why someone might want a degree in informatics. having a degree from an informatics department myself (though my degree is technically in Information and Computer Sciences), I thought the article did a pretty good job of describing what informatics is and why it's a valuable field.

it also reminded me of a discussion on a departmental mailing list a while back. someone asked for a "party definition of informatics," that is, "What is your best definition, to be given at social occasions such as parties, of what Informatics is?" this sparked some pretty standard and some really fabulous responses, which I want to quote below (these are all anonymized--if anyone wants to claim credit for one of these, let me know; or if you want your definition removed, I can do that, too).

"People ask me if I work on the hardware or software side of computing. I tell them I work on the sociology side of computing."

"The process of transforming Data into Information"

"Sometimes I do strange things with computers. Sometimes I watch other people do strange things with computers."

"I usually start by saying that 'Informatics' is a silly word that gives almost no insight into what the field is actually about and just serves to confuse people.... Then I say something useful ;)"

"Computer Science with a heart!!"

"I think that is what makes the difference between HCI, ubicomp, SE and the rest of disciplines in computer science."

"Informatics, the softer side of ICS."

"I say that I study how technology is shaped by culture and how culture shapes technology. And sometimes, if so inclined, I mention that this is important to understand for technology design."

there you have it, a zeitgeist of what informatics is from a bunch of informatics grad students.

how we know: epistemological foundations of information systems research

2010-01-22T17:01:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading a pretty fabulous paper: Orlikowski, W.J. and Baroudi, J.J., 1991, Studying Information Technology in Organizations: Research Approaches and Assumptions, Information Systems Research, 2(1): 1-28. basically, they do a survey of 155 papers from 1983 – 1988, arguing that the large majority adhere to a positivist approach, a small minority follow an interpretive approach, and none adopt a critical approach. the reason this paper rocks so much is the cogent, clear, concise, summaries it provides of these three epistemological traditions, citing both strengths and weaknesses, complete with case examples of each. quick overview:

positivist – reality exists external to the researcher, and phenomena of interest accessible to through observation via sensory organs or measuring instruments; “the phenomenon of interest is single, tangible and fragmentable;” “he researcher and the object of inquiry are independent;” “nomothetic statements, i.e., law-like generalizations independent of time or context, are possible” (Orlikowski and Baroudi, p. 9); the goal is the discovery of general laws or universal principles.

interpretive – “reality, as well as our knowledge thereof, are social products and hence incapable of being understood independent of the social actors (including the researchers) that
construct and make sense of that reality;” assumptions and potential limitations clearly stated up front; “the aim of all interpretive research is to understand how members of a social group ... enact their particular realities and endow them with meaning” (ibid., p. 13); “the researcher in part creates the reality she is studying” (ibid., p. 15).

critical – “social reality is historically constituted;” rather than studying or explaining reality, “critical researcher attempts to critically evaluate and transform the social reality under investigation” (ibid., p. 19); a major component is exposing, and likely attempting to overturn, currently unseen or unvoiced assumptions and hidden contradictions; “interpretation of the social world is not enough. The material conditions of domination need also to be understood and critiqued” (ibid., p. 20); major focus on socio-economic class, labor relations, and the conflict therein.

another summary and comparison with other work can be found here. the article is quite insightful and chock full of demonstrative examples. I highly recommend you go read it.

furthermore, it was particularly useful for me, as I’ve recently been thinking through a lot of related issues, often via questions of legitimation of knowledge construction and enactment of disciplinary rigor. the paper did, as most good papers do, also help raise some further questions.

much of the paper describes how these epistemological stances apply to information systems research, arguing for their various applicability or inapplicability to social phenomena. for example, the positivist approach asserts that “organizations... have a structure and reality beyond the actions of their members” (ibid., p. 9), whereas an interpretive approach would assert that the organization’s structure exists because of its enactment by its members. I was left wondering, how do these various epistemologies apply to physical or natural sciences? there is some allusion to the growing idea in such sciences that positivism is something of a myth, but I think such treatment is beyond the scope here (potentially belonging in an STS paper). I wonder, how would interpretive particle physics or critical evolutionary biology look and feel? how would natural/physical sciences change if, rather than believing that they were discovering the true nature of reality, scientists instead believed that they were actively creating reality? would it simply be an acknowledgment of the social process involved in scientific investigation, or would there be deeper, more substantial changes?

in the discussion of the interpretive perspective, there is a distinction between the “weak” and the “strong” view. in the weak view, positivist and interpretive approaches are suited to understanding different phenomena in different ways and producing different types of knowledge. the two can complement one another. the strong view, on the other hand, rejects the very grounds on which positivist research is predicated and does not believe that it can produce valid knowledge. the notion that the two are different lenses through which to perceive different aspects of related phenomena I find appealing, but I can also see why, due to the rather different philosophical commitments involved in each, it might be difficult to reconcile findings from positivist and interpretive studies.

the critical approach emphasizes “totality, which implies that things can never be treated as isolated elements” (ibid., p. 19). phenomena being studied must be understood in terms of the social, historical, cultural, political, and other contexts that cause them to come to be. however, it seems that, ultimately, everything is related to everything else. how, then, does one practically scope a study? arguably, the point of totality is that context is not just context (i.e., with the text), its text, the thing being studied itself. taken seriously, totality seems to pose a major problem in terms of tractability.

I also noticed, as Orlikowski and Baroudi point out, that the critical approach focuses very heavily on socio-economic class, labor relations, capital, and markets, often at the expense of “other factors such as race and gender” (ibid., p. 23). this is clearly related to the problem of totality; not everything can be taken into account, your analytic focus must be somewhere. furthermore, it makes me wonder if “critical” is in some ways a politically correct, though thinly veiled, guise for “Marxist.”

Orlikowski and Baroudi’s major point is that none of these epistemological stances is perfect—each has its strengths and weaknesses, philosophical commitments and founding assumptions—and the job of the researcher is both to be aware of the impacts of choosing a particular stance, and to acknowledge the validity of alternative stances. I couldn’t concur more. especially coming from a highly interdisciplinary field, some of the major tensions I see arise from epistemologically-oriented issues, though they sometimes come in the form of methodological critiques.

however, I was also left wondering, must a researcher commit entirely to a given stance, with both its strengths and weaknesses? or is there the potential to hybridize these approaches, doing so with a conscious and reflective eye to knowledge production? for example, could you conduct a quantitative survey, informed by positivist methods, that takes into account an interpretive perspective and seeks to achieve critical destabilization of the current social order? similarly, could you build a computation system, using tools and techniques developed under a positivist paradigm, but deploy (and potentially evaluate) that system in a way that foregrounds users’ interpretation of the system and of their reality as experienced with and through the system, specifically focusing on using those experiences to critique the status quo for both users and designers of the system? yes, this is a bit of a silly hyperbole, but it’s meant to make an important point: why do we have to accept all the baggage of a single approach? can we not learn from analyses such as that of Orlikowski and Baroudi in order to advance our reflective knowledge production? perhaps obviously, I think the answer (in my part of the information science/studies world) is a tentative yes, but I’ll leave explication of why and how for another post.

technological extravention

2009-12-20T08:04:00.000-08:00

technology can solve any problem. or at least, that’s what plenty of folks seem to believe. lots of work (I’m thinking here largely about research on computational technology, but this line of thinking can also be applied more broadly) describes a problem and then presents some sort of technological intervention intended to solve the problem. every so often, I’ll see a paper describing how, in the process of attempting to solve one problem, the technological intervention actually led to more problems than it solved, and once in a rare while someone will argue that perhaps the best approach would be not to introduce the technology in the first place, but such critical reflection is, in my experience unfortunately rare. I’ve ranted about related notions in the past, particularly with respect to the ways in which companies and NPOs foist technology in places where it might not be wanted or needed, but never with a specific alternative course of action.

I want to suggest such an alternative approach here. rather than studying the impacts of a technological intervention, what if we to conduct a technological extravention? that is, how might our understand technology use, particular the ways in which that technology is interwoven among larger social and cultural constructs, by removing the technology? being a bit of an etymological enthusiast, I’ll admit that the etymology here is a bit off; something like “technological extraction” or perhaps even “technological extradition” might be a bit more accurate, but I think the neologism I’ve used helps emphasize the nature of the critique.

envision conducting a study of preventing a group of people from, for example, using text messaging, or sending email, or reading blogs, or tweeting (I suspect there might be a difference between forcibly preventing people from using some technology and people willfully avoiding its use, but I’d hesitate to speculate what the exact differences might be without further consideration of the specific technology and specific individuals involved). how would people adapt to such situations? how would the renegotiate their various social interactions that are currently mediated via these technologies? at the conclusion of the study, how might people’s long-term patterns of use change? obviously, there would be plenty of logistical challenges to overcome (how would you find people willing to participate in this sort of a study? how would you ensure that participants were complying with your requested non-use? what if the study disrupted the conduct of their work, connection with their families, or some other basic aspect of their lives?), but I suspect the results could be highly informative and worth the difficulties. while an admittedly small step in the direction I’ve suggested, such a study might be a concrete way of suggesting that, in some cases concerning technology, perhaps less is better.

(thanks to various members of the Social Code Group, conversations with whom started my thinking along these lines)

angels and demons and climate change

2009-12-11T11:12:00.000-08:00

this made be wince a little: More Americans believe in angels than humans’ role in global warming

this made me laugh out loud: What if?

is more participation better participation?

2009-10-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

a few weeks ago, I attended a panel at the IEEE Social Computing conference on "Promoting National Initiatives for Social Networking," which ended up being largely about social software and political participation. panelists included Sandy Pentland of MIT, Jenny Preece of U Maryland, Ben Schneiderman of U Maryland, and Kevin Grandia of Hoggan and Associates. each variously extolled the virtues of political participation and civic engagement, as well as how (information and computational) technologies could be used to support and encourage such participation. Kevin provided a nice bit of counterpoint with several examples demonstrating some of the potential problems associated with these approaches.

there was one question I’d wanted to ask but have the chance: do we really want more participation? that is, is having more people participating in the political processes necessarily better? I don’t intend to be Machiavellian, though I’ll admit to being something of a devil’s advocate here. however, whenever there are fundamental assumptions at work, such as this one that more participation is better, I find examining, questioning, and occasionally problematizing such assumptions beneficial in terms of determining exactly the goals we’re trying to accomplish, as well as considering alternate means of approaching those goals and/or methods of inquiry related to such approaches.

first, let me consider what exactly we mean by participation. in the broadest general sense, democratic participation usually translates to voting. at other times (e.g., in Farrell, Lawrence, and Sides’ definition), it implies activities such as contributing money or time to a political candidate/party/campaign, or attempting to convince others to vote a certain way. in the context of the above mentioned panel, it seemed that participation was framed in terms of civic engagement; involvement with political issues; and participating in deliberative debates about governmental polities, their implications, their results, and alternatives. for example, Sandy Pentland talked about citizen-science-style sensing and census data to determine the impacts of policies intended, e.g., to increase education levels in low-SES neighbors, or to reduce pollution from factories and power plants. this arguments for the benefits seemed two-fold. first, collecting and presenting these data could enable politicians to be held accountable for their policy design and implementation decisions, preventing politicians from making vacuous claims of efficacy in the absence of any concrete evidence. second, making such data readily accessible and comprehensible would involve and engage more people in the political process by lowering the barriers to entry, thereby creating a better democracy.

it’s this second point on which I want to push here. that is, is involving more people more directly in governmental and political processes actually beneficial in terms of creating a better democracy? brief consideration would suggest that, yes, it does; since democracy is about government of, by, and for the people, involving more people in that government will make it more equitable, thereby preventing the abuse of the many by the few. however, one of the central premises of American democracy, as well as that of many other (Western) democratic nations, is representation. that is, rather than being a direct democracy where every member of the state has a direct vote on every policy or governance question, we elect representatives who represent us in such decision processes. in direct democracy, not only does every citizen need significant knowledge of every issue, but so much of citizens’ time is consumed with the political process that they have little time left to live their lives. furthermore, based on the apathy evidenced by low voter turnouts in many elections (at least in this country), getting people engaged with and interested in such issues is a non-trivial problem.

however, I’ve recently become aware of a third option that represents something of a compromise between direct and representative democracy: deliberative democracy (slight caveat: I’ve only recently become aware of the notion of deliberative democracy and, at the time of this post, am still in the process of wrapping my head around it). elected representatives ultimately make the political decisions, but citizens are involved in the decision making, deliberative process. this approach seems to share a certain sensibility with participatory design, but that’s a topic for another time. what I want to consider here is something that seems like a central tenet in deliberative democracy: by involving a large, diverse group of citizens in the political process, there can never be full and complete agreement. that is, there are differences of opinion that, no matter how much deliberation and participation you have, will always be irreconcilable differences. thus, by increasing the amount of participation in political debates, one increases the likelihood of such irreconcilable differences, thereby making it more difficult to reach a compromise or mutually agreeable solution.

I want to ask if, instead of increasing the quantity of participation, we can instead improve the quality of participation? trying to involve every single citizen not only runs up against theoretical problems in terms of irreconcilable deliberation, but it also runs up against practical problems in terms requesting participation from those who are disinterested and/or unmotivated. again, I’m not arguing that a government controlled by the few is better. rather, I’m arguing that those who participate in government (a) should be those who are most interested and motivated to do so and (b) should participate in a deep, meaningful, effective way. while a fully detailed exploration of what might be meant by deep, meaningful, effective participation is probably beyond the current scope, I’ll suggest here three potential ways in which such participation might manifest: consideration of long term impacts, consideration of all parties involved, and consideration underlying assumptions. while I’d like to pursue each of these at length in future posts, it’s much more realistic that to suggest instead that those interested should start a discussion in the comments.

it does a body good (?)

2009-08-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

here's a quote from someone commenting on somewhat spurious results in metaViz, specifically, the metaphor that "America is like milk":

I disagree; I do not think that America is very much like milk at all. Milk is thick, smooth, and sweet, while America is rather...gritty. America is like Metamucil.

some of the replies are just as good.

Yet America very rarely gives you your daily recommended fiber, so, perhaps America is just muddy water?

America is like milk in the sense that new immigrants tend to get homogenized.

absolutely fabulous, I couldn't have asked for a better alternative metaphor.

it is done

2009-07-07T13:54:00.000-07:00

I don’t usually do posts about my personal life. however, there are few events quite so momentous, and since this particular event spans both the personal and the academic, I thought it appropriate (nay, necessary!) to include here. this is also a bit delayed, but still relevant.

on June 19th, 2009, I became Dr. Baumer. that is, I submitted the final version of my dissertation to the UC library (more specifically, the UMI website whereat I could submit a .pdf of my dissertation, thus sparing me the procurement, and printing of my dissertation on, 100% cotton acid-free 20-25 lb. watermarked dissertation paper) and the accompanying paperwork to UC Irvine’s graduate division. I still haven’t become accustomed to people calling me “Dr. Baumer,” as several people, including my father, my cousin, my advisor, several friends, and the administrative assistant at graduate division, have done by this time. because of scheduling details, I actually walked in the commencement ceremony on June 6, even though my defense was on June 15, because UCI only holds one commencement per year, at the end of spring quarter, for all those graduating any time during that calendar year. thus, even before I was official Dr. Baumer, people were already using that appellation for me.

I had wondered from time to time if I’d feel different. based on what I’d gleaned from others’ experiences, I suspected that I wouldn’t, and indeed, I don’t feel much different. but at the same time, I do, although it’s not a recent thing. thinking back over my time in graduate school (the details of which I will not recount or reminisce here, but were all told quite fabulous), the times that I noticed “feeling different” were quite before I completed the requirements for my degree. there were two I recall specifically.

the first was during my first year, in fact my very first quarter, of grad school. I could feel myself changing, changing rapidly, in ways I could not with specific words describe but could with the utmost certainty feel. in addition to moving such a great distance to California—not just physically, but also socially, emotionally, etc.—I ended old relationships, began new ones, found new friends, strengthened ties with old friends, and reconsidered the very constitution of friendship. I was becoming new, becoming someone new, a new and different person, but, somewhat paradoxically, I simultaneously felt as if I was becoming more myself.

(I must admit, at this point, that I’ve been reading Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and can feel myself being influenced by his writing style, if only in a pale, imitative sort of way)

the second was some time during the midst of my graduate studies. again, rather than being tied to a specific moment, it was a change that happened over a longer period of time but still felt rapid and sudden. during this time, I experienced a number of realization, realizations that I have been subsequently told are integral to success in graduate school. (1) I realized that I knew more about research than did my advisor, in technical, philosophical, epistemic, and other ways. this was a bizarre sort of realization, even given the fact that my advisor’s primary training (i.e., his undergraduate and master’s degrees) was in biology and animation. why I expected that he’d be knowledgeable about the technical details of my work, I’m not certain. this is not to say that he was unhelpful; quite to the contrary, his was integral advice in getting me “unstuck” during crucial periods, and his was invaluable encouragement in enabling me to finish. this realization was closely coupled with the next, that (2) I cared more about my research than did my advisor. similarly, this is not to say that he did not care, but rather than I was the single most important factor, the driving force behind getting my research done. the third realization is one that’s difficult to express in words, but is potentially the most important, likely most associated with, and potentially definitive of, becoming Dr. So-and-so. (3) I was, as a researcher, intellectually independent. yes, obviously, like any other researcher, I consulted with my colleagues and superiors. yes, obviously, like any other researcher, I bounced ideas off of friends and family. however, I didn’t feel as if I was working for anyone. I was working for myself, following my own agenda, pursuing the research questions in which I was interested. I suspect that some may enter graduate school with such a feeling, knowing at least generally, if not precisely, the path they wish to pursue; and I further suspect that many more leave graduate school without experiencing such a feeling, following rather the belief that they are largely a cog in the research machine of their advisor, their institution, their funding source, or some other overseer. however, it seems to me that such a feeling of intellectual independence is the defining trait, the raison d’être, of an academic, and I count myself lucky to have been given the opportunity to experience that feeling.

as one would assume, I’ve been quite busy over the past several months completing my dissertation work, which is partially the reason for my lack of blogging. I will try to return to something of my previous pace (generally averaging around one post every other week or so), but I make no promises. I’m writing this post on a plane on the way back from Ireland (via a layover in Amsterdam), constituting something resembling an (all-too-brief) post-dissertation vacation. starting July 6, I will be beginning began a position as an Assistant Project Scientist (which is more-or-less a big name for a post-doc) at UCI, largely doing follow-up research on my dissertation research, but also starting in on all the projects and ideas I’ve had to keep on the back burner while finishing up my dissertation. thus, while I envision having slightly more free time as a post-doc, since I won’t be worried about passing quals, completing advancements, or writing/defending dissertations, but I’m assuming I’ll be super busy doing research, mentoring/supervising undergraduates, and trying to figure out what it is that I’ll be doing next.

that seems to be the question on everyone’s mind. whenever I mention that I just finished my Ph.D., people almost invariably ask me “so what are you doing next?” while the later half of the above paragraph describes the near future, I’ve also spent a great deal of time thinking about the more distant future, as in, what I’m going to do after I complete my time as a post-doc. ::insert a long pause while I stare at the clouds out the window contemplating my future::. I entered graduate school, in fact my very motivation to apply to graduate school was, to become a professor. while I’ve had and continue to have certain misgivings about that occupation (if not about academia in general), a tenure-track position at a research institution seems the most amenable to pursuing the goals I want to pursue. with the above-mentioned feeling of being a (relatively) independent intellectual, I’ve been spending a great deal of time considering just what those goals are, and the questions and issues towards which I find myself most drawn (the details of which I won’t explore in this already (almost too) long blog-post) strike me as best pursued in an academic/university context. as any sane person in my position would, I intend to keep an open mind about potential paths to pursue, but for now, what’s “next” is burrowing into some serious research, publishing like crazy, and keeping an ear open for academic research positions. (how pragmatic, I know, but what did you expect?).

hybrid design practices - ubicomp 2009 workshop

2009-04-20T12:09:00.000-07:00

some friends and I recently had a proposal for a workshop on hybrid design practices accepted to the workshops program of ubicomp 2009. whatever are hybrid design practices, you ask? here's a snippet from our cfp:

Current Ubicomp research and practice often go beyond interdisciplinarity. New hybrid practices are created, by synthesizing methods from multiple disciplines, such as design, ethnography, engineering, and sociology. This does not only imply crossing of disciplinary or epistemological boundaries, but also engagement across diverse cultural sites and perspectives. We take hybrid practices to mean day-to-day interdisciplinary practices that are often established beyond pre-designed institutional, disciplinary, or transdisciplinary boundaries. This hands-on workshop will focus specifically on hybrids that involve the design of ubiquitous computing systems, drawing together both individuals who have experience developing and using such hybrids, as well as those who have an interest in applying hybrid practices to their work.

Thus, this workshop explores questions such as:
• How might ethnographic field work be incorporated into design practice?
• How might design practice work be incorporated into ethnographic field ?
• How might fieldwork or design sketching be integrated more closely into the process of theorizing?
• What might theory-oriented design or design-oriented theorizing look like?
• What role can Ubicomp design practice play for cross-cultural and multi-sited explorations?

sound interesting? check out more at the hybrid design practices workshop webpage.

position papers due June 25 via email to Silvia (lindtner [at] ics.uci.edu).

extremes

2009-02-27T13:33:00.000-08:00

a few days back, I heard someone make the following comment. he was describing different reactions to the advent of some new technology (I don't recall exactly what), saying that different people felt very differently. the two poles of reactions were described as follows: "it was the best thing since sliced bread, or the worst thing since the guillotine." wow. since it was during a formal research talk, I had to exert a massive effort not to laugh out loud. "the worst thing since the guillotine"? is that a common adage, or did the guy just make that up?

unintended consequences

2009-02-24T11:04:00.001-08:00

my apartment complex recently implemented a new parking permit system. until last fall, residents received plastic hand tags with an pretty uniquely identifiable iridescent sticker (ostensibly making them difficult to duplicate). as September 2009, they switched over to an electronic system. residents enter their car's license plate number (or those of their visitors, with a limited number of visitors per quarter) online. cars from parking and transportation equipped with cameras and a specially designed computer vision system then drive around the parking lots, automatically issuing tickets for those parked illegally.

nevermind for the moment the surveillance and privacy issues. those are certainly pretty complex, but I feel like they're also some of the more obviously problematic aspects of this technology. what I want to comment on here is a somewhat subtler impact I noticed a week or two ago. it used to be that going to the grocery store, the movies, the dentist, or wherever, one would quite often see hang tags for the graduate student housing complex in which I live. it's not as if I know or am friends with a very large fraction of the hundreds of grad students that live there, but seeing those hang tags created something of a sense of solidarity, of community; it made me feel like I was not alone as a grad student and that, even in this hyper-planned suburban area in which I live, there was a group of people with whom I could identify.

however, since the deployment of this electronic system, no one needs to display hang tags anymore. I didn't even realize that something had been lost until recently when I saw someone who had an old tag up that she had not taken down, which made me realize that I missed the tags. it was interesting, because I'd heard lots of discussion among students and professors about the implications of the new system as related to privacy and surveillance, but I'd not heard anyone else mention the socio-emotional impact of not seeing grad student parking hang tags. I wonder if anyone else has had similar experiences. I find this a particularly provocative example of the development of sociotechnical systems. often times, designers are encouraged to consider the impact their designs may have, beyond just the technical, before deploying them. certainly, one could have hypothesized about or considered surveillance-oriented impacts, but the impact of the absence of visible hang tags would have been, I suspect, harder to anticipate and even harder to address. I wonder if there are better ways of predicting, and accounting for, such effects, short of actually deploying the system.

magic

2009-02-09T12:53:00.000-08:00

well, it's probably just coincidence, but it's fun nonetheless.

for those of you who don't pay particularly close attention to these sorts of things, the end of this week we have a Friday the 13th coming up. most people think about Friday the 13th as a particularly unlucky day, a superstition the origins of which are much debated. however, growing up, I always noticed that particularly good things would tend to happen to me on Friday the 13th. none of them were particularly momentous -- I won something in a drawing at school, I received some good news about planning a family vacation, I spent the day hanging out with friends -- but they always gave the entire day a "good" vibe.

recently, my attention was called to an interesting numerological fluke; the UNIX time code for 1234567890 resolves to 23:31:30 Feb 13, 2009 (UTC). for those unfamiliar with UNIX time, that means that, at 23:31:30 Feb 13, 2009 (UTC), exactly 1234567890 seconds will have passed since 00:00:00 Jan 1, 1970, a date which is dated as the beginning of the Epoch. for me, this will be 15:31:30. to see how this resolves in your timezone, you can try one of the following:

Mac OS X: date -r 1234567890
Ubuntu Linux (or Debian or similar flavors): date -d @1234567890
other: man date (see what parameters to use to convert UNIX time to local time)

many commenters on the post linked above seem to believe that such coincidence bodes incredible unluckiness, but I like to that that it will be far more lucky than un. as it happens, at that exact second, I will likely be listening to a talk (or questions thereafter) by Ben Schneiderman. not sure what kind of (un)lucky events to expect, but I'm guessing the talk should be pretty good.

fabulous

2009-01-21T16:30:00.000-08:00

I recently came across some brilliant creative work: spam poetry. these are poems constructed entirely from the subject lines of spam emails the poet receives. the dates on the website give the impression that the work is a couple years old, but I just discovered it recently.

here are two of my favorite stanzas. the first is from "Sometimes I worry":

grammarian and under
funded
education is dead
in America.

I wonder if the poet looks for subject lines that include punctuation, like that ending period, or if she adds punctuation as needed. the other one I like is from "全国総合出会いセンターよりお知らせです。":

To everybody in Columbus
An apology -
The cookies are coming....

RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

possibly the best poem currently on the front page is "Your secret?" which must be read in its entirety to appreciate it fully.

while there are myriad reasons that this work is fabulous, rather than engaging in an intellectual diatribe (and since I've still much more data to analyze today), I'll just leave it for you to enjoy.

an intentional error?

2009-01-12T13:13:00.000-08:00

while looking up email addresses for some faculty in my department, I noticed an interesting anomaly. if I simply click on the faculty member's email address, it opens my email client with a new email properly addressed. however, if I right click, select "Copy Email Address," then paste it in the To field for a new email, there is a leading "%20", the HTML code for a space. I initially thought this might be just a typo, that there was an extra space in the mailto tag, but the character appear on all the email addresses. perhaps this is some sort of counter-spam effort.

looking closer at the HTML source, it does seem to be counter-spam. for example, the link to email Richard Taylor shows up as follows:

<a href="'mailto
:%20taylor@ics.uci.edu'">taylor&
#64;ics.uci.edu</a>

to the average human eye, this looks mostly like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, but effectively it's encoding the mailto tag using ASCII code points, swapping the letters for numbers. thus, if someone looks directly at the HTML source, as most spam harvesters do, it doesn't look like an email address. even if someone does try to automatically harvest it, there's an extra space in there. however, when the browser renders it, everything looks normal, and you can even click on the address and your email client will automatically remove the extra leading space for you.

what I don't quite understand is how or whether this actually impedes spam harvesters. if a browser can render the above coding into a meaningful email address, why can't a email-harvesting bot do the same? do most harvesting bots just go for low-hanging fruit rather than trying to decode obfuscated email addresses? is it just a matter of adding one more layer of resistance? or is there something intrinsically difficult about having a bot resolve the above HTML to a meaningful email address?

why I enjoy working with children

2008-12-01T16:50:00.000-08:00

as part of a unit on cell biology, students were asked to come up with metaphors for understanding a cell. they learned about a cell with the metaphor a Cell is a City (the nucleus is city hall, the mitochondria are powerplants, etc.), and then they were asked to come up with their own new metaphor, something else that a cell is like. most said things like a school, a car, a restaurant, or a house. however, one student said that "a cell is like the sky." when asked why, s/he replied

The sky has many moving clouds in it's vast blue sea. The clouds could remind me of the organelles in a cell. If you use your imagination, you can see them interacting with each other.

not only is this a rather unique metaphor, but it gives the cell a grandeur, beauty, and grace not commonly found in science learning.

a new metaphor on election day

2008-11-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

how long did you stand in line to vote? I spent about an hour and forty-five minutes at my local polling place this morning. and based on what I hear from other parts of the country, that wasn't even that bad.

while you're hanging around waiting for the results to be counted (which is probably starting about now on the east coast), here's an interesting metaphor that metaViz turned up recently: a candidate is like a theory. I think it provides a great alternative to the common adversarial rhetoric surrounding political campaigns (even the word "campaign" is reminiscent of war). click through for a full description and a link to the visualization.

newest tinkering toy: NodeBox

2008-11-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

I've been spending a little time over the past two days playing with NodeBox, a suite of graphical utilities for programmatic image creation. it's based largely on python and uses a bunch of the graphical innards available with Cocoa (thus, it's specific to Mac OS).

thus far, it's pretty awesome. it's pretty straight forward to understand and rather powerful with even simple commands. not only is there a super helpful tutorial, including primers on many programming concepts for non-programmers (variables, lists, loops, etc.), but it's very easy to quickly creating striking, perhaps even compelling images. in just a few minutes, I was able to throw together this image, based on random placement and coloring of all the tags I've used on this blog:

the sizes, positions, colors, and even which tags to use are all random (not all tags are used, and some are used more than once, e.g., "iTunes" shows up twice near the lower left corner). I realize that this does not adhere to more "traditional" approaches to tag clouds, where in position is based on alphabetical order and size is based on frequency of use, but for now I just wanted something fun. for example, the way that "iTunes" overlaps with the first three letters of "oxymoron" make the "-moron" part much more noticeable.

if you're at all interested in programmatic image generation (or just like playing with fun, designer-y toys), I highly recommend you check NodeBox out. I'm planning on using it to create some images based on the data behind metaViz, so keep an eye open for that in the next couple days (hopefully, before the election).

metaphors in political speeches

2008-10-31T11:14:00.000-07:00

as I mentioned previously, I've been spending a lot of time recently working on metaViz, a computational system designed to identify conceptual metaphors in political blogs. metaViz also includes analysis of the campaign speeches from McCain and Obama (presidential candidates from the two major political parties). there's a UCI press release that gives an example interpretation of some of the results. I think the major value of the press release is that it shows how the system is meant to be used and how one might go about interpreting the metaphors that it identifies. check it out, and let me know what you think.

if you can't beat 'em, sue 'em

2008-09-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

ugh. Eugene tells me that Thomson Reuters, maker of EndNote, is suing the folks at George Mason University who make Zotero. basically, the claim is that a recent feature of Zotero, enabling users to directly import a citation library from EndNote into Zotero, is in violation of the EndNote EULA. furthermore, the article states that the folks from GMU reverse engineered EndNote to create Zotero.

I might believe that creating software that directly imports an EndNote library is against EndNote's EULA. it would be in their best interest, in terms of discouraging competition, to legally ensure such a lock down. however, I've been using Zotero before such a feature existed, and I had no problem migrating my library from EndNote to Zotero. if I recall correctly, EndNote will export as BibTex, which Zotero can then import (it may be some format other than BibTex, I don't recall at the moment, but the point is the same).

edit: in the comments, Bruce rightly points out that the lawsuit is not about the ability to import an EndNote library, but actually about the ability to import EndNote's .ens styles into the .csl citation style language used by Zotero. I can see where this might be grounds for a potental lawsuit, since the .ens format is a proprietary one owned and designed by Thomson Reuters. however, the format that the .ens style describes is certainly not the proprietary. moreover, allowing your software to open file formats of competitors is pretty standard practices. consider OpenOffice, which happily opens, edits, and saves to MS Office's .doc format. it sounds to me like Thomson Reuters is using this as an excuse to sue GMU for making what is arguably a far superior product (and doing it open source, no less).

which brings me to the claim that "GMU reverse engineered Reuters' EndNote software to create Zotero." I find quite hard to believe. Zotero functions so much more smoothly and effectively than EndNote ever did, I highly doubt that reverse engineering EndNote was the basis for Zotero. I really don't think Thomson Reuters stands a chance at winning the lawsuit if it goes to court.

however, my fear is that it may not go to court. I'm not certain whether or not GMU would see it in their best interest to spend the legal fees necessary to take the battle to court. it's entirely possible that they may simple remove the EndNote import feature (or even worse, take the site down entirely). I'm not sure how this has panned out in similar open source cases (e.g., MS Windows v. Linux/Unix). law suits like this really make me wonder if the current scheme of intellectual property law in the US actually fosters innovation. or does it instead just fosters bullying and enables large corporations, backed by lots of money and lawyers, to edge out any smaller competition, even if the competition is superior?

update: those who are interested can find more commentary on this issue and more discussion of the legality of a .ens to .csl converter (thanks to Bruce for helping point me to these).

it looks so tasty

2008-09-24T22:48:00.000-07:00

this is too funny to pass up.

see the recipe for eyeball caprese on Evil Mad Scientist.

research instigating critical thinking

2008-09-04T23:44:00.000-07:00

I just saw an idea come up again that I've noticed in a couple places: the notion that research (generally academic) is not only beneficial, informative, and potentially transformative for the researcher, but also for the participant.

I don't recollect all the other places in which this idea has arisen. in my brief look at action research, it seemed that research as an agent of social change was a central concern in that approach. that is, research is not just about the researcher learning something about the subjects, but the subjects actively participating in, and contributing to, the research, somewhat a la participatory design. the experience also came up in my own research on blog readers, wherein participants became more aware of, and reflective about, their own blog reading practices and habits as a result of participation in the research. most recently, while reflecting (further) on questions about knowledge attribution in blogging and ethnographic research more broadly, Lilia Efimova points out that "often it’s not only the researcher who learns new things, but also people who participate in the research, when their thinking on a subject is triggered as a result of an interaction" [emphasis added].

it seems that doing research is particularly good at getting people thinking, not just the researchers, but also the participants. rather than seeing this as a side benefit, what if we were to engage in research where the sole purpose is to get participants thinking critically? how might research look differently if the primary goal was not making a "novel and significant contribution to knowledge" but rather fostering critical thinking and reflection on the part of those involved in the research? I'm not saying that forsaking knowledge making in favor of flipping bits in people's heads is necessarily desirable. rather, I'm wondering aloud how research might look and feel different if creating a particular type of experience for participants' was made a concern of greater importance. how would this different approach manifest itself, and what might it be able to tell us about the purpose and place of doing research?

the power of names, naming, and knowing names in digital culture

2008-09-01T23:16:00.000-07:00

I was just trying to look up the grammatical rules for a certain construction in English wherein two nouns are used together to refer to a single entity. for example, "Computer Science" is such a construction, as it uses the noun "Computer" and the noun "Science" to create a new noun. I started off googling "multiple word noun," "multi-word noun phrase," and similar variants. somewhere along the line, I recalled that this construction might be called a compound noun, and sure enough, that's the right name.

there are plenty of times where, through iterative searching, you can figure out the right search terms to use to find what it is that you're after. however, there are certainly other instances, like this one, where if you don't know the name of something, you can't find out anything about it. there are lots of situations where this difficulty arises. if you want to know the name of the artist who painted a famous work, it's difficult to search for the work itself, even if you know exactly what it looks like, without knows its name (presumably, you could browse various galleries and archives, but now you've circumvented needing to do a search). similarly, if you saw the symbol for British pounds but tried to search for "L with a line through it," you wouldn't get very far. interestingly, though, search "O with two dots" gets several hits for umlaut, making that one pretty easy to find based on the description.

not only does this have potential implications for designers (and users) of text-based search engines performing queries related to non-textual data, there are serious implications with respect to distribution and exercises of power. choosing a name for something is obviously a powerful act. however, knowing a name for something gives you power as well, but power of different sorts. the power of reference, the power of understanding, and, I'd argue, powers of searching and finding.

this line of thinking makes me wonder what other sorts of power come along with knowing names, especially in digital cultures where most digital knowledge-oriented activities and interactions are text based. it also makes me wonder how one might subvert the power of name-knowing. one possibility is, as a namer, choosing a name that is so general it does not refer with any specificity to the thing in question. another option might be something like google bombing, which makes it the case that knowing the name of something might end up leading you away from the thing. I wonder what other sorts of power relations might be involved in name-knowing, and how those power relations might come into play with different ways of naming and ways of knowing.

metaViz (i.e, what I've been up to lately)

2008-08-31T16:34:00.000-07:00

I'll admit, I haven't been blogging as much as I'd like to this summer. most of my time has been spent developing metaViz, an application designed to allow blog readers to see potential conceptual metaphors in political blogs. here's a blurb about the project:

metaViz is a system that finds conceptual metaphors in political blogs, displays the metaphors in an interactive visual fashion, and lets you look at the different ways in which many concepts are framed in those blogs. For example, a 'campaign' is often talked about like a 'war' -- both are 'fought,' 'won,' 'lost,' 'survived,' etc. The goal is to foster critical thinking, getting people to think about what's being said not just by the words themselves, but between and behind the words.

if you have a chance, check it out, and feel free to pass it along to anyone you think might be interested. if you have any thoughts about the project, drop us a line, we'd love to hear from you.

"quantum computing...

2008-08-21T01:09:00.000-07:00

...is the computing of the future and always will be."
- Jean-Luc Gaudiot

link to a demo

2008-08-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

I've been a little taciturn of late with respect to blogging, not so much for lack of ideas, but for lack of time. to hear a bit about on what I've been working that's taken so much of my time, check out this post about a demo we did today.

I may very well be blogging over at Calit2.Life pretty soon, in which case I'll cross-link from here.

I want a color-coded bookshelf

2008-07-20T23:28:00.000-07:00

imagine if your bookshelf looked like this (via information aesthetics). I really want to try doing this with my bookshelf at home, not because it really needs to be organized or is so massively huge I can't grapple with it, but because I think it would make for an interesting aesthetic experience (and it would be kind of fun).

patriotism and matriotism

2008-07-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

about a week ago, John Holbo from Crooked Timber posted in reaction to a discussion of what constitutes patriotism. there are some really interesting questions raised, including (but not limited to): can patriotism condone or include a critical stance towards one's country? do liberals and conservatives have different versions of patriotism? does patriotism mean thinking your country is objectively the best, or is it more akin to familial love or loyalty to a sports team? is patriotism an import quality for all citizens to have, or is it essentially a military virtue? if an individual is patriotic, must s/he love everything about her/his country, or is s/he allowed to love only some aspects thereof and wish to remake others? near the end of the post, the blogger quotes Carl Schurz: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." I think that does an excellent job of summing up what patriotism is (or perhaps should be) about, and I highly recommend reading the posted linked above, as it's got some great thoughts on the topic.

however, what I want to discuss here is not patriotism per se, but the language we use to think about (and by implication the concepts we use to think about) patriotism. at one point in the post, Jonah Goldberg is said to have quoted Ramesh Ponnuru as saying, "can't love of my country be like love of my mother?" Holbo says this conception, rather than patriotism as thinking your country is objectively the best, is pretty much spot-on the way to approach the issue.

If you love America because it is objectively the best at doing certain things that’s fine but not patriotism. That’s like loving your football team only so long as its winning, which is sort of the opposite of team loyalty. As I was saying: who thinks that loving your mother means loving everything about her to the point of being opposed to your mom improving herself or getting her act together or overcoming her problems? If your mom has problems – maybe really serious problems – and your brothers or sisters are trying to help, do you stand athwart the train of helping mom crying ‘stop!’ On the grounds that you love her too much to bear to see her become better, hence un-mom-like?

what's interesting here, to me, is the use of "mother" as the image for country. not least is this striking because of Lakoff's discussion of the "strict father" vs "nurturant parent" metaphors for conservative and progressive politics, respectively. what's interesting is why patriotism is not described as loving your country like you love your father. the etymology of patriotism and patriot come from the Latin and Greek meaning, roughly, "of the same father." given this etymology, and given Lakoff's assertions about conservative philosophy framing government as a strict father, why does Ponnuru describing loving one's country like loving one's mother rather than like loving one's father? I have a few guesses.

first, I think it's partly because it's because Ponnuru (and Goldberg, for that matter) are male. for a man, loving your mother is expected. loving your father is perfectly reasonable, as well, but it's a different sort of love. it's the love that is at most times gruff and distances, and it only comes through in bear-hug embraces at special occasions like graduations, weddings, and perhaps some holidays. it's not the kind of interaction that's usually associated with love. with your mother, though, it's much more of a caring, comforting sort of love. I think, implicitly, Ponnuru, and through citation Goldberg, are here trying to set up a certain sort of framing of how they think about country and government, that it is not a somewhat distances, gruff interaction, but that citizen and country truly care for each other.

second, there are different perceptions about correcting mother vs correcting father. in the scenario one describes above, it's easy to envision gather with siblings to try to correct some of Mom's more self-destructive behaviors. but can we really envision correcting Dad? I don't think so, at least not as readily (I'm sure that those more familiar than I with feminist literature on authority in the family would have more informed things to say about this than I do). given the etymology of patriotism, I'm a little surprised at the idea of loving your country like you love your mother, but given the argument being made, it's not a surprising framing at all. if we're making the point that patriotism and desiring to change/correct your country are not mutually exclusive, it seems much more advantageous to frame country as mother than as father.

so who cares? does it really matter if we love our country like we love our mother or like we love our father? yes, it matters a great deal, partially by virtue of the fact that many people often tend to think that it doesn't matter all that much. using the metaphor that your country is like your mother has different entailments that your country is like your father. by using the language associated with maternal, rather than paternal, relationships, the speaker invokes (albeit somewhat subconsciously) a whole series of entailments and implications about interacting with one's country, based on interacting with one's mother. I think what's important here is not the specific metaphor being used, whether it's mother or father. what is important is recognizing that a metaphor is being invoked at all and questioning what that metaphor implies, what is doesn't imply, and what alternative metaphors might be used. how would patriotism be different if we thought about it instead being like loving your father? or your grandparent? or your uncle? what about being like your relationship with your coach? your boss? your therapist? how about a different metaphor entirely that doesn't anthropomorphize one's country and treat it as a sentient human being, but rather frames the country a complex entity whose actions arise from the combination of many individual actions? in this regard, the country as a sports team metaphor might be better, but there is another whole slew of entailments and implications concomitant with the sports team metaphor that are really beyond the scope of this (already somewhat longish) post.

suffice it to say, I think there needs to be some critical questioning of the ways in which we talk about and think about these central, key political concepts, such as patriotism.

to drill or not to drill or ...

2008-07-14T22:34:00.000-07:00

I was listening this morning to a story on NPR about Bush's expected lifting of the executive ban on off-shore drilling. in immediate impact, this doesn't mean a whole bunch, since the legislative ban has not (yet) been lifted by congress. rather than discuss all the politics of this particular issue (e.g., the argument that off shore drilling won't actually affect gas prices), there were two aspects of the story on which I'd like to comment.

first, there was a woman from Alabama saying that her state was doing its part in helping with the oil crisis, so why shouldn't Florida do the same. she went further, talking about how oil rigs are not all that disruptive. "...it's just interesting little blips on the horizon. It's just part of this area." people think that turbines for generating wind power are eyesores on their hillsides, but they will tolerate oil rigs dotting their horizon?

second, what really baffles me about this issue is that most of the coverage I've seen and heard treats the issue in a rather binary fashion, looking at arguments for and against off shore drilling. what I don't understand is why people aren't challenging the need for oil in the first place. rather than spending time, money, effort, labor, etc. on extracting oil from the Gulf of Mexico (which, by the way, is estimated to hold enough oil reserves to meet the US's needs for about six months), why not spend those resources on developing alternatives so that we don't need the oil to begin with? not only does this save us even having a debate about off shore drilling, but it actually does something to help reduce the causes of global climate change.

I'm certain there are other people making this argument. it just irritates me that, to my knowledge, it doesn't seem to get addressed in any of the major media.

questions about "citizen" journalism and secret journalists

2008-06-29T22:27:00.000-07:00

on NPR this morning, someone had written a letter-to-the-editor type comment about a piece on citizen journalism, that is, journalistic-style reporting by non-journalists. I'm really not a fan of the term citizen journalism (or its relative citizen science, for that matter), but that's the subject for another post. here, I want to focus on a comment about the NPR story. one listener said that citizen journalism is potentially problematic when such citizens do not identify themselves as serving a journalist-like function, as people on whom are being reported should be aware that such reporting is taking place. I wonder if that assumption, that the average person off the street is not going to report on your interactions that s/he observes, is really well founded.

I'm not encouraging or endorsing the practice of secret journalism or being intentionally misleading about one's intent to broadly disseminate information. however, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that any act taken in public will not be posted online. I'm thinking in part here of George Allen's macaca debacle. he clearly did not consider, even though he was speaking publicly in front of a largish audience, that his speech and actions would be as public as they became. but I'm also thinking in part about greater trends of watchfulness and sousveillance. it's not necessarily the case that every word you say will show up on the front page of tomorrow's New York Times or Slashdot post, but that possibility definitely exists for your every word.

how do we as a society and as a culture cope with such possibilities? one obvious approach is to assume that pretty much everything you say or do might be available for public consumption. however, I don't think that's really viable, for a number of reasons. normal social interaction depends on a certain degree of deception; plausible deniability is a necessary social gloss in many occasions.

ultimately, I feel like the currently predominant notions of public and private are not really sufficient for talking about or thinking about the ways in which we present and construct our selves, and the ways in which our selves get presented and constructed by others. I'm not quite sure what alternative conceptions might be more useful, but I suspect they would likely focus on identity, how we construct our identity, how others construct our identity for us, and the ways in which we maintain different identities in different contexts.

more not always better

2008-06-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

I've previously noted some of the problems with blaming obesity on large portion sizes in restaurants. here's an interesting article looking at the development of portion size over the past twenty years. in discussing changes in the size of coffee servings, the author notes that "When made into a mocha, the morning coffee has as many calories as a full meal." perhaps that's part of why people don't eat breakfast (which ends up being pretty darn important in terms of setting your metabolism for the rest of the day). there's not a not of data there, but there certainly are some interesting comparisons.

reporting and reportage

2008-06-15T15:32:00.000-07:00

a couple weeks ago, NPR was running several reports on Karachi, Pakistan. it's part of their Urban Frontiers series looking at growing cities around the world. hearing the reports throughout the week gave the listener (or at least this listener) the interesting impression of gaining some understanding of urban Pakistani culture. various segments described demand for housing leading to illegal building projects, which then necessitated the bribing of government officials to get "protection" for such projects; or how inconsistent infrastructure meant that, for that same illegal housing, builders needed to throw hooks into powerlines and "steal" electricity; or how racial and ethnic violence nearly resulted in the death of an ambulance driver whose skin didn't seem to be quite the right color.

for a moment, I felt like this NPR reporter was doing a service to his listeners, allowing them to glimpse a culture beyond, and likely very different from, those with which they are familiar. however, upon further consideration, I came to the conclusion that the reports were doing almost as much of a disservice, not only to the listeners but to the Pakistanis on whom were being reported. the events and circumstances of Karachi were depicted not from the perspective of a citizen, but from the perspective of an American reporter. listeners were seeing the culture, but it didn't seem as if any attempt were being made to foster an understanding of the culture.

I couldn't help comparing these reports with ethnography, done both well and poorly (both being variously common in my field). an important aspect of ethnography is that the ethnographer presents a culture in its own terms, from the perspective of a member of the culture. the purpose is to portray the subjective, lived experience of what it is like to be a member of a culture. contrast this with portraying a culture from an external perspective, applying analytic categories and distinctions to a culture that might not exist in the culture itself. a classic example is that of studying Micronesian navigation. when trying to do so from a western navigational framework that posits a birds-eye view, the Islanders' techniques seem inadequate, at best, to get them from one island to the next. however, if one adopts an ego-centric (or boat-centric) view, rather than the more objective-seeming birds-eye view, the Micronesian navigation system not only makes sense but works strikingly well. this difference in perspectives is sometimes referred to as the etic/emic distinction, that is, viewing a culture on an observer's terms from an external (etic) perspective vs viewing the culture on its own terms from a member's (emic) perspective.

upon reflection, it seemed that the NPR reports on Karachi had an etic perspective that gave the appearance of an emic one. what does it mean to those people who are laying the hooks to be garnering electricity from the city's powerlines? is it stealing (a category that a western reporter might apply to such an activity) or do they conceptualize it differently (perhaps with a category of activity for which a western reporter might have no analog)? on the one hand, this choice of perspective isn't wholly bad; it's journalism, after all, not cultural anthropology. however, I worry that we (as a society) might grow to accept this type of reporting as providing a sufficient understanding of a culture, an understanding from our external perspective rather than from the culture's own internal perspective. I'm not arguing that ethnography is a veridical representation of reality; ethnography is a form of reportage, and inevitably in that process of reportage is the reporter. however, there is a certain sensibility in that reportage that I did not find in the aforementioned NPR series. just as Paul notes, a whole bunch of things have sprung up in HCI that attempt to follow ethnography's methods but not its methodology. I worry that something similar might be happening in this form of journalism, and I wonder what some of the implications might be in terms of understanding and appreciating cultures (both others' and our own).

local knowledge and knowing in the doing

2008-06-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

about a year ago, I saw Lost in Translation. it's really an excellent film, but what I found most striking was the depiction of being an American visiting Japan. I was there for a conference back in 2006 (and incidentally took my phd qualifying exam while staying in Hakodate, but that's another story), and I found myself watching various scenes say, "yeah, that's exactly how it feels." watching the movie felt like being a lone American traveling in Japan.

however, the other people with whom I watched the film weren't quite as taken with it. only afterward did I consider that none of them had been to Japan or any non-western country (here, I'm counting most of western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand as "western"). I suspect that part of the reason they didn't care for the movie is that they couldn't particularly identify with it. the plights of some of the characters certainly transcend the particulars of the situations that brought them to Japan, but the particular aesthetic, the feel, the experience of watching the film resonated with my experiences in Japan so strongly that I saw that as one of the film's greatest strengths, its ability to so perfectly capture and express that experience.

I've recently been doing a bit of research about blog readers. one particularly striking thing I've noticed during this process is the difference between reading about blogs (and virtual communities and online identity); no matter how many times I'd read Nardi et al. or boyd or Miller and Slater or any of these other folks, I never could have gained the understanding I got from actually doing the research myself. rather, I could never have gained the same kind of understanding from only reading. I draw at least two important conclusions.

first, there is no substitute for actually "getting one's hands dirty" doing research. I heard it suggested recently that, often, it doesn't matter what you set about to research, as long as you research something, because even if you think you know what you're studying, you're going to wind up working on something different. to that I'd might add that even if a large majority of your results are reiterations of those from previous studies, you as the researcher come to know those same results in a different way (perhaps even more fully) than the way you would know them from reading alone. this sort of knowing, the "knowing in the doing" or what Schon calls knowing-in-action, seems impossible without the doing.

second, it makes me wonder about the place and purpose of scholarly writing as a means of sharing ideas. it's not that the type of knowing that comes from reading isn't valuable. rather, the author/researcher, because of her or his unique experiences, understands what s/he knows in a way that the reader cannot, unless of course the reader has had similar experiences. granted, there is a sort of deeper philosophical issue about how we can ever come share meaning, but I'm going to side step that for the moment in favor of something slightly more pragmatic. if the major method of disseminating knowledge in academia is writing papers, and the kind of knowing/understanding that comes from reading is different from the kind of knowing/understanding that comes from doing, why not have more of an emphasis on doing, especially doing together? I think this sort of emphasis on doing is at work in various places, but it doesn't seem to be fore-fronted as much as might be beneficial (this is probably also my bias towards constructivist/constructionist learning coming through). rather than having conferences consist of presenting papers, lets get together and do studies together, analyze data together, theorize together, design together, and generally engage in our practices and concomitant (collaborative) knowledge construction together.

to split or not to split?

2008-06-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

while recently editing a paper, I found myself automatically correcting split infinitives. while I was taught that this grammatical construction is generally to be avoided, there are time when (I think) it allows a certain specificity and precision of expression not easily achievable otherwise. for example "to truly enjoy great music" and "to enjoy truly great music" mean rather different things, namely, truly enjoying music that is great or enjoying music that is truly great. I suppose one could say "truly to enjoy great music," but that starts becoming unclear to which clause "truly" belongs. for example, in "I want Henry truly to enjoy great music," does truly modify "want" or "to enjoy"?

at the Language Log, it was recently suggested that, rather than debate such rules using only argumentation, it may be possible to test some of these empirically. this is not a matter of statistics about which usages are more common, but rather studies about which usages are more readily and easily comprehensible. the specific examples used in that post focus on the use of "they" or "them" as a third person singular neuter pronoun in different contexts, e.g., the presence or absence of a gender expectation for the antecedent. much of the methodology of the studies mentioned have to do with speed of reading and comprehension, based on the cognitivist metaphor of the mind as a computer. while I'm not sure I buy or like this methodology, it might be possible to do similar experiments based on final comprehension as the measure of effectiveness. for example, give the three variants of the split infinitive listed above, and then determine whether people think my wanting is true, Henry's enjoyment is true, or the greatness of the music is true. by and large, I'm not an experimentalist, but it seems like something like this should be via. what exactly the results would tell you is another question entirely. there's also a question (raised in the comment on the Language Log post) about whether the primary purpose of grammar is to be clear or if there are other concerns, such as aesthetic, historical, or cultural ones, that should be considered, as well.

in general, I agree, split infinitives should probably be avoided, but what about when they allow a specificity of expression not otherwise possible? when "fixing" the split infinitive changes the meaning of the sentence in a way not easy to restore, I'm a little hesitant about not splitting the infinitive.

think fruit

2008-05-15T14:07:00.001-07:00

apparently, there's a bit of an apple parody in the new Grand Theft Auto game.

the tagline on the fruit phone made me laugh out loud.

"test" reserved word in python?

2008-05-05T10:43:00.000-07:00

I just had a rather odd experience with python. I've got a module named "test" (specifically, a directory named "test" with an empty __init__.py file in it) with a couple other modules in it, including one called "test_sel_pref" (i.e., a source file "test/test_sel_pref.py"). I can do

import test

just fine, but the module doesn't seem to contain anything other than the usual (__class__, __doc__, __file__, etc.). if I try

from test import test_sel_pref

I get

ImportError: cannot import name test_sel_pref

after checking several things, I started wording if "test" wasn't some sort of reserved word in python. it's not on the list of python keywords or the list of python reserved words, and keyword.iskeyword('test') returns False. just in case, I tried renaming the directory to "testData." sure enough,

from testData import test_sel_pref

worked like a charm. I looked around, but couldn't find anything that talked about an existing test module that would block me from having a module called test. for now, renaming the directory did the trick, but I'd like to know what was going on here. any thoughts?

demos remixed

2008-04-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

I recently picked up a copy of Tom Erickson and David McDonald's (eds) HCI Remixed, which, while I've only read a few chapters, really seems like a fabulous collection of essays by some super cool people. I can't tell you how excited I was looking through the table of contents, not so much at the chapter titles as at the authors. I kept thinking, “ooh, he's in here. oh, and a chapter by her! hm, I wonder what he'll talk about.” so far, it's been pretty interesting.

one chapter that really got my interest was Wendy Ju's on The Mouse, The Demo, and the Big Idea. in it, she mention's the Media Lab's “demo-or-die” culture, something on which I have previously noted mixed feelings. from my experience, demoing forces you to be able to articulate your ideas, helps you refine your ideas by needing to present them, and gives you a good sense for what flies with which sort of people. on the other hand, some great ideas are not really demoable, and an overemphasis on demoing might lead to such projects not being developed as fully as possible. however, Wendy notes a couple important and interesting aspects of demoing that I hadn't considered.

one is a quote from her advisor Michael Hawley that “the true role of research is to flop bits in people's heads.” while certainly true, in practice, this becomes somewhat more specific; exactly which bits do you want to flip in which direction and in which people's heads? demoing is great, because you get a chance to flip bits in the heads of people beyond those whom you are targeting and with whom academics might not otherwise interact on a regular basis: business folks, politicians, government officials, public school students, public school teachers, foreign dignitaries, and other people. even if they never “use” what you're demoing, you get the opportunity to plant your ideas in their heads, and hey, maybe it ends up changing the way they think about something just slightly. we usually think about dissemination of research in terms of conference or journal publications; demoing can provide an opportunity to disseminate to a much broader audience.

something else Wendy notes is the way that demos can end up feeling like a sales pitch. “a great demo creates converts; people are not just knowledgeable about your ideas, they are sold on them.” I suppose this could be construed as a negative, since it really does end up making demos often feel like sales pitches. as a counter example, though, she cites the example of Engelbart's mouse demo, describing how he comes off as nothing like a salesman but instead a knowledgeable, passionate, sincere researcher. “a great demonstration,” she says, “is not hype, but proof.” I'll admit that I'm not quite ready to buy this assertion, probably because it strikes a little too close to that part of me that really vibes with Latour's work. people will believe in the device when the device works; the device will work when people believe in the device. it is not necessarily the case that a successful demo means a working idea, and a working idea does not always mean a successful demo.

this brings a the third interesting point, the Big Idea. Engelbart's “central goal in his research was augmenting human intellect.” at the time, most people were largely interested in either office automation or artificial intelligence, and the focus of his work didn't really fit into either of those categories. furthermore, people doing research in those areas didn't immediately, if ever, see the value of Engelbart's contributions, because they couldn't figure out how it would apply to, or help them solve, the particular batch of problems in which they were interested. however, Wendy asserts that this is often the nature of such big ideas. similar to Arthur C. Clarke's assertion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from madness, she says that “any sufficiently advanced vision is indistinguishable from madness.” furthermore, the Big Idea itself “doesn't even have to be right, it just has to compel us to want to go out and do stuff, stuff that is different from what everyone else wants to do.” personally, I found this greatly encouraging. I'd been feeling recently that my research didn't really have a home. some of the stuff on which I'm working [LINK] draws on and uses a lot of AI and computational linguistic methods, but it really doesn't fit into any pre-existing box in those field (stuff like parsing, sense disambiguation, sentiment analysis, topic extraction, or the like). I think there's a place for this work in HCI, particularly with an educational focus, but there again it's sort of coming out of left field, not solving any particularly well-defined problem in those areas (such as supporting learning communities, providing constructionist toolkits, studying group cognition, etc.). while some of this research doesn't currently have a home as such, it's heartening to think that this lack of a home does not necessarily mean that it is not worthwhile; though at the moment somewhat homeless, it still has the potential to be valuable, compelling, and, moreover, make an impact.

...and effect

2008-03-25T16:27:00.000-07:00

about a month ago, I posted about the political views slot on facebook profiles and the somewhat puzzling set of options it presents. later, Sam notified me that apparently facebook had expanded its political vocabulary. instead of listing not a spectrum from conservative to liberal (with libertarian tossed in for good measure), they now provide a free response slot, similar to that for religious views, except that facebook now has a compendium of political parties in almost every country around the world from which users can choose. while the party system has its own problems, this is probably an improvement over the single conservative-liberal dimensions, especially for countries where there are more than two large, dominant parties.

this also made me wonder, did facebook really read by blog, as Sam had suggested? the more likely story is that on the official facebook dispatch about the feature, that "users have often asked for the ability to select from more options to describe their political viewpoint, so [they] expanded the list." furthermore, I highly doubt they could have compiled that extensive a list of political parties from around the world in the 10 days between my post and the announcement of the feature's release. still... it sort of makes you wonder (or at least it makes me wonder).

political affiliation

2008-02-25T23:28:00.000-08:00

while adjusting some privacy settings on facebook, I noticed the profile spots for Political Views and Regilious Views. political is a drop box with pre-specified options, while religious is an open-response text box. this alone is cause for interest. are political views more pidgeonhole-able or easily classifiable? are the facebook creators more worried about offending someone by excluding their religion than their politics? then I saw the specific options listed for Political Views:

Very Liberal
Liberal
Moderate
Conservative
Very Conservative
Apathetic
Libertarian
Other

wow. I really had to read it twice. the only one that's actually a part is Libertarian (I don't think there's an Apathetic party, as I suspect it might be a little oxymoronic).

however, this is troubling at a deeper level. what if I'm morally conservative (e.g. against gay-marriage and abortion), but I believe in expansive governmental social programs like welfare and public health care? is that moderate? to me, it sounds both very conservative and very liberal, just in different ways. this sort of polarization is really neither helpful nor healthy, but, I think, is quite damaging. it seems like just the sort of thing against which John Stewart railed on Crossfire several years ago. trying to put political views on a single axis like this not only makes it difficult for me to express my identity (something that facebook should help me do), but it really reinforces this obfuscation of the complexities of our current political situation.

...or you could just be libertarian.

evaluation, interpretability, and the utility of dreaming

2008-02-22T22:08:00.000-08:00

a few nights ago, my girlfriend and I watched The Science of Sleep. for those not familiar, the basic premise revolves around a main character who has difficulty discerning between his waking life and his dreams. afterward, we got into (what I felt was) a somewhat confused conversation about whether or not it was a good movie, why it was a good movie, and how you know it's a good movie (and I fear that conversation has led indirectly to what is an almost equally confused blog post). one of the pseudo-conclusions to which we came is that it's a good movie because of its interpretability. that is, there are several parts of the movie, foremost the ending but also bits and pieces throughout, where it was, we think, left intentionally unclear what exactly happened. the point is not to figure out the "true" or "real" story at those points. rather, the genius of the movie seemed its ability to engage the audience in interpreting those somewhat ambiguous parts. my mind kept slipping towards questions of evaluation; how do we know it's a good movie? when the key aspect of the movie has nothing to do with the movie objectively and everything to do with the interactions between movie and viewer, how can one really say anything about the movie itself?

evaluation is a huge buzz word in HCI. "ok, cool, you built your system, but does it work? does it achieve the intended goal?" I've heard it described that part of a dissertation is scoping out a problem, picking a portion of that problem, describing the win condition wherein you know that the problem has been solved, and, crucially, demonstrating that the win condition has been achieved. even when we recognize that evaluation is an interactive process, that it's really about the meeting of system and user, evaluation so often boils down to a question of success. does the system achieve the goals it set out to accomplish? there are certainly lots of conversations going on right now about richer, fuller means of evaluation, focusing less on system evaluation and more on experience evaluation, and emphasizing that evaluation is a process of determining value, which is necessarily contextually (historically, culturally, etc.) contingent. personally, I find a lot of this work both particularly compelling and very liberating, especially with respect to the epistemological questions it raises; what do we as a field consider valid knowledge, and how do we validate methods of knowledge production? on the other hand (maybe it's just that I'm having a hard time shedding my positivist roots), I have a desire to know, does it work?

this desire becomes inherently problematic when the ostensible goal of a system is to support, facilitate, encourage, and even engender critical thinking and reflection, especially when that reflection hinges on the interpretability of the system. here, I refer to interpretability not as a question of "do participants interpret this system properly?" rather, the question I want to ask is, "to what extent does the system present a resource for interpretation?" it's difficult enough to ascertain whether or not interactors are engaging in these abstract process--critical thinking, reflection, interpretation--to begin with. now, try to determine to what extent the interactor's thoughts, feelings, behavior are a result of interacting with the system. the very notion seems misguided; we're not dealing with a system cause-and-effect relationship here, but rather a whole complex system in which I doubt any single aspect can be causally linked to any other. besides, this isn't about controlling for confounding factors. it's about getting people to think, to critically engage, and to question, reconsider, and possibly even reformulate their conceptual frame.

I think one of the difficulties in my case is that the system I'm developing has a goal that seems objectively evaluable. does it do what I say it does? am I able to automatically identify conceptual metaphors (a la Lakoff and Johnson) in bodies of written text? well, I think the question of whether or not it works, or how well it works, depends largely upon the interactor's (i.e., "user's") interpretation of the system's results. moreover, I think it hinges on the interpretability of those results. the question, I suspect, should not be, "does the system accurately and correctly identify conceptual metaphors?" rather, the question should be, "does the system produce results that serve as a resource for the interactor's interpretation, and through that interpretive process does the interactor engage in critical thinking and reflection?" not that this is a particularly easy question to answer, but it seems a somewhat more useful one in terms of evaluating, i.e., determining the value, of the system. it's not about measuring success, it's about understanding the interactors' experience with the system.

this ended up getting too long for a single post, so I'll end with the above thoughts about evaluating interpretability and reflection. more stuff about dreaming to follow...

iSchool dissertations and rigor

2008-02-06T20:37:00.000-08:00

I was following this discussion at UW's iSchool, and the previous week's, on what constitutes an information science dissertation, and I found the (posted) results of this panel rather interesting. they list a series of pragmatic suggestions from students, the first and most important being to "satisfy yourself first," followed by a list of expectations from professors. One striking expectation from the professors is that the dissertation be "rigorous." I suspect it is no coincidence that this expectation is followed by being able to justify a qualitative dissertation to a quantitative researcher and vice versa. While we can all agree that research should be rigorous, what actually constitutes rigor seems to vary, at times greatly, and not just along quant/qual lines. The faculty in the department at my school seem similar to UW: folks from different disciplines coming together due to common interests. This leads to different definitions of what counts as rigorous, sort of a panoply of perspectives from which to choose the best fit for your particular problem.

I'm wondering, though, as iSchools begin to graduate students, what will the field of information science consider rigorous? will it maintain this panoply approach? will certain approaches get canonized and others become discredited? will we generate new approaches distinct to iSchool-type problems? what are the potential ramifications if these methods get picked up and transfered to other fields? when and how might such new methods be considered rigorous, both in info sci and in other disciplines?

merry christmas, from the IRB

2008-01-29T22:36:00.000-08:00

just came across this doing some catch-up reading. wonderful for anyone who's ever needed to get IRB approval.

Santa meets the IRB

a teaser...

You propose to "know when they are sleeping and know when they are awake". How will this be done? Will children undergo video monitoring in their beds? Will they have sleep EEGs? You list 100 elves as research assistants. Are any of them a sleep physiologist?

issues, anyone?

2008-01-23T10:15:00.000-08:00

I was just listening to a report on NPR about surveys of people likely to vote in the California primaries. for republicans, the number one issue was illegal immigration. for democrats, the top issues were health care, the war in iraq, and jobs and the economy. OK, sure, none of that is particularly surprising.

what is surprising, and even I think galling, is that the environment doesn't seem to be a big issue for anyone. what's going on here? despite increased awareness in the news, popular media (e.g. Inconvenient Truth or 11th Hour), and public opinion, the candidates in the primaries don't seem to be talking about it very much. why not? I think there's a lot of environment good will out there, and candidates could do well to capitalize on it. if a person could show how s/he could help the economy, decrease the national debt, provide health care, and do it all in an environmentally conscious and sustainable way, virtually nothing could stand against that kind of platform. so why not do it?

friday shuffle (belated)

2008-01-19T21:22:00.000-08:00

done using Banshee's random

Mother Superior - Coheed and Cambria - Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow
Debate Exposes Doubt - Death Cab for Cutie - The Photo Album
Million Miles Away - The Offspring
Are We There Yet - The Ataris - Anywhere But Here
Green Greens, from Kirby - New Japan Philharmonic - Smash Bros DX Concert Official
Hope - Apocalyptica - Cult
Baby's Got Sauce - G. Love and Special Sauce - G. Love and Special Sauce
241 - Reel Big Fish - Turn the Radio Off
Halo - Soil - 18
Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds - The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

not only does Coheed and Cambria have long, rather involved album titles, but they absolutely rock.

who am I?

2008-01-10T16:28:00.000-08:00

I'm at a talk at HICSS being given by Martin Wattenberg. he gave a pretty cool talk about the social uses of many eyes. Tom Erickson just suggested that part of the motivation for the use of SNS is so that people can see their social network, that they draw a sense of power from seeing a visual representation of their friends. Tom then drew an analogy, saying that your social network diagram is sort of your "21st century coat of arms," which I thought was incredibly interesting and provocative. Tom seems to have a knack for saying such things.

techno-values

2008-01-02T22:15:00.000-08:00

I recently came across a quote from Ursula Franklin (via Kevin from Question Technology) about a donation of computers for an educational institution. to her colleague who had just negotiated the donation, she asks, "Think about the analogy between your computer gift and the gift of free Bibles" (the link above has a more extended quote). bibles were once used to teach people to read, but obviously more was learned than just how to read. Franklin calls for greater, more reflective awareness of, and explicit dealing with, "the social assumptions that are embedded in every design." Kevin connects this to the $100 laptop project, and an important connection it is. I however, am left thinking of other connections.

Ong's Orality and Literacy examines the cognitive, social, and cultural impacts of the technology of writing. oral cultures have certain aspects to their communication: anything that needs to be remembered must be said in a memorable way, otherwise it will be forgotten due to the ephemeral nature of speech; speech is heard and sometimes felt, internalizing it, while written words are seen, making them external and objective; speech requires narratives to be of a very formulaic character, so as to be memorable by the bard and comprehensible by the audience, while writing allows for more complex narrative structure because the reader can refer to what was said in the last paragraph. these are just a few of the interesting implications of the adoption of the technology of writing. Ong goes on to discuss the "second orality," communication media that resemble speech but also have characteristics of writing. while he had in mind media like TV and radio, much of what he said applies to email, IM, txt, etc. what unintended results will come from use of digital media?

I'm also reading Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, so I can't help but make a connection there, as well. Weber's thesis is that the protestant ethic (a moral calling to hard labor, the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, that an individual "exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse") results largely from the doctrines of several protestant sects, particularly Calvinism. I'm only part way through, so I can't yet sum up his whole argument, but this is another interesting example of unintended outcomes. Weber goes so far as to say that the worldly spirit of capitalism is in some cases in opposition to the beliefs of those from whose teachings that spirit derives.

in these cases, it's possible to conjecture about potential consequences and implicit values, but one cannot always make entirely accurate predictions or account for every possibility. I don't think this means that we should throw up our hands and abandon hope of responsible use of technology. however, it does leave me somewhat unsatisfied. must we just be reflective about the values we are incorporating into our designs? while awareness about factors such as gender bias are certainly important, I doubt that introspection is not enough. can we be explicit about the values in our designs? I'm not sure that explication will help, either. how does one say to the average consumer something like "this device incorporates the semiotic notion that a sign can stand in for the thing being signified" without having their eyes glaze over?

what's a socially conscious (technology) designer to do? I suspect that part of the answer is certainly a raised awareness on the part of designers. however, I think an important, but often overlooked, factor is raising awareness on the part of the consumer/user/prosumer(/wrangler ::shudder::). I would love to see technology that not only causes the user to consider the values explicitly or implicitly incorporated into the device, but furthermore causes that same user to consider the technology itself, to question it, to ask, what does this technology do? what does this technology do to me? how do I use the technology? how am I intended to use the technology? how do I actually use the technology? what does this tell me about the designer? what does this tell me about the marketing/manufacturing of this technology? what does this tell me about me? obviously, in order to make such technology requires socially responsible designers. however, technology has far more capacity for impact in the hands of socially aware, critically reflective users of the technology. the very use of a technology should cause the user to question her or his use of that technology. I want to see technology like that. I want to make technology like that.

the logical art of technology

2007-12-17T20:35:00.000-08:00

yes, that's right, time for another etymological interlude.

over the summer (yes, my backlog of things to blog really is that long), I started wondering, what are the etymological roots of the word "technology?" well, with a little help from dictionary.com's entry on technology, I discovered the following.

from the Greek technología systematic treatment. see techno-, -logy

looking at the entries for techno- and -logy reveal something quite interesting.

techno- is from téchné, for art or skill. it's also used particularly to form compound words meaning "technique" or "technology." -logy, from the Latin -logie, which is in turn from the Greek -logia, refers us to -logue. this stem comes also from Latin, -logus, then Greek, -logos, and makes another reference to logos, the word from this stem derives. the word logos in English refers to rational principles in philosophy. the Greek logos refers to a word, saying, speech, discourse, thought, etc. (the interested reader can also refer to similarities between logos and lection).

to what does this amount? well, techno- is used to refer to a technique, meaning an art or skill. logos is used to refer to logic, particularly that sort of rational logical reasoning in Western philosophy. as I technologist, I find this somewhat inspiring, that technology can be seen, in a way, as a meeting of art and logic. not that it is logical art, not that it is artistic logic, but that it is its own hybrid of the two. however, I also find it in a way illuminating with respect to many of the challenges faced in technology development. by its very nature, technology, especially computational technology, requires codification, explication, and quantification. however, the téchné of the things for which we use computational technologies--social interaction, cultural artifacts, knowledge and meaning construction--by their very nature resist codification, explication, and especially quantification.

I don't think all of this is necessarily implied by the word "technology" itself. the point here is instead to demonstrate how the etymology of the word can be used as an elicitor of (potentially useful) reflection.

disciplinary pride

2007-11-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

walking around campus last week, I passed by the chemistry building, which has a sand and rock garden out front. one morning, I noticed that someone had written in the sand outside the chem building

CHEM IS BOHRING

for a brief moment, I thought the message was left by some disgruntled undergrad who was being dragged through some general ed requirements. then I got it. hilarious. I actually stopped and laughed out loud. unfortunately, by the time I came back with a camera, someone had returned the sand to its previous, uniform, unamusing state, so I can't post a picture, but at least I can recount the story.

self-reference and a koan

2007-11-13T08:16:00.000-08:00

two great quotes I heard recently. the first one is your oxymoron for the day:

The only thing I cannot tolerate is intolerance.

this is somewhat akin to fearing fear itself, except that it doesn't make the speaker appear brave and insightful, but rather self-important and unreflective.

and quote number two:

Social interaction is simply more than one person doing things together.

I really like this one. if you just read it, nothing seems awry, but as soon as you actually try to parse it, the sentence sort of falls apart. a bit Zen, I'd say.

friday shuffle

2007-09-28T14:56:00.000-07:00

haven't done this in a while...

Reel Big Fish - Boss DJ - Live
Dexter Freebish - Spotlight - A Life of Saturdays
Relient K - Softer to Me
The Decemberists - California One Youth and Beauty Brigade - Castaways and Cut-Outs
Death Cab for Cutie - Information Travels Faster - The Photo Album
Lost Prophets - Burn Burn - Start Something
Dance Hall Crashers - Elvis & Me - Honey I'm Homely!
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes - Summertime - Are a Drag
Nobuo Uematsu - Forever Rachel - Final Fantasy VI OSV
Dispatch - Passerby - Who Are We Living For

since I'm in the process of upgrading my desktop (I have computer parts and their boxes, manuals, and cables strewn across the floor, somewhat to the chagrin of my girlfriend), I did this one on my iPod (shuffle: songs; music -> artists -> hit play). not sure if it's a different random number generator, but it does seem to be a somewhat different cross-section than usual.

google ad nonsense

2007-09-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

I love the targeted ads with Google's Adsense. I write an email to my girlfriend about squashing a spider in our apartment, and she sees ads for exterminators. OK, that makes sense. usually, I just ignore these, but recently there have been a few that caught my eye. today, I was reading a page about how to install Mac OS on non-Mac hardware (e.g., anything x86), and here's this ad in the side bar.

Toilet Partition Hardware
Jacknob® - Over 2,400 Items for Toilet Partitions

huh? I somehow doubt this is a subtle implication about Mac OS being a "crappy" platform but rather the use of the keyword "partition," which here is referring to partitioning a hard drive, not a toilet (I'm not even sure what the latter means).

here's an even better one. a couple days ago, my girlfriend was checking her gmail when she noticed an ad on the side that says something to the effect of "Searching for a threesome." yes, it was an add so that you and your partner could find a third. what was the email she was reading about? it was about coaching the women's ultimate frisbee team. I'm thinking that some key words and phrases like "recruiting more women" or "hardcore practices" or "groups of girls" may have tipped it off, but I feel like ad sense should be somewhat more sensible than that. or maybe not, who knows.

anybody else have google ad nonsense stories to share?

scdc

2007-09-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

as I biked to the building where my lab is this morning, I noticed many a sign for an on campus event. apparently, we're currently hosting the SoCal Drosophila Conference in the atrium and main auditorium of our building. I realize this is rather petty and silly, but I amused as I thought to myself, "my word, our building is being swarmed by fruit fly people!"

ok, back to revising the paper(s).

unmediated publics?

2007-08-21T20:09:00.000-07:00

this summer, I've been spend a significant portion of my time doing some blog-related research. I don't want to blab too much about the specifics, but essentially it's a project that focuses on blogging from the reader's perspective and examines the role of the reader in the activity of blogging. if that sounds cool, let me know and we can chat.

what I want to talk about is something that's come up during our lit review. in reading other stuff about blogging, I came across this notion of mediated publics, particularly in some of danah boyd's writings. if I follow, it's the notion that blogs, SNSs, and other sorts of social (usually digital) media create means of public interaction that are in one way or another mediated. blogs create a method of being public, but that public presence is mediated by the digital medium in which it's manifest. similarly with SNSs, virtual worlds, or, I gather, most any virtual interaction.

however, I'm left with the question, does this imply that offline, face-to-face, physical interaction is unmediated? on the one hand, sure, I'd be willing to buy that. in most (though certainly not all) cases, people aren't using a wearable heads-up display or interacting with a physically collocated person through some sort of digital intermediary. however, on the other hand, there are lots of things other than digital media that mediate our social interactions. (as a side note, there are interesting etymological relationships between medium and mediate, but as much as I love an etymological interlude, I won't go there at the moment). perhaps it's just because I've got activity theory on the brain, but I can't help but think of the Vygotskian notion of mediation. daily activities and interactions of all kinds are riddled with all sorts of mediators: language, culture, history, the physical environment, and even to some extent our bodies mediate our activity. indeed, any and every activity is mediated by something; unmediated activity simply does not occur.

I'm not saying that the notion of mediated publics is not a useful one. I think it is, as I think it draws into focus important ways in which virtual interactions are mediated by the medium in which they occur, fact that can be lost in some analyses. however, I think it misleadingly implies that physical interaction is unmediated. since pretty much all activity is mediated in some form or another, mediated publics might be something of a vacuous term. I suspect the term "digitally mediated publics," though somewhat more verbose, better captures the topic at interest. if what's really of interest is any sort of mediated public interaction, then, since all activity is mediated, what we're talking about here is really any sort of public interaction, and I don't think that's the point. I think the point is to look at the way that digital mediation affects public interaction, comparing and contrasting it publics that are mediated in other, different ways.

activity triforce

2007-08-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

for those of you who may be familiar with activity theory, the following might look familiar.

this is the usual depiction of Engeström's version of the activity theory model: one large triangle decomposed and subdivided into what appear to be other, smaller triangles. however, I just saw another, somewhat different depiction.

hm, interesting. for the moment, nevermind the slight differences in the naming of the nodes. instead, I would like to draw your attention to the similarity between this and another symbol, one I recall quite fondly from my childhood.

that's right, the Triforce from Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series. Engeström's analytic approach to human activity is really the modern day incarnate of the ultimate golden power from ancient Hyrule.

...ok, I'm done geeking out now, time to get back to work...

the intentionality of plants

2007-08-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

"it's trying to grab hold of the fence"

"it wants to face the sun"

"I think this one's just given up"

"they like the afternoon sun"

in the past week or so, I've found myself in the garden saying each of the above in reference to plants. it's interesting, because common conception says that plants don't really "try," "want," "think," or "like" anything. ultimately, I know that the plant doesn't "want" to face the sun, but rather that the sun striking certain parts of the plant cause some cells to expand and others to constrict, effectively orienting the plant to face the sun and thus expose as much surface area on its leaves as possible to the sun. it's all a strictly chemical process, but it seems quite a bit easier to ascribe intentionality to the plant. it makes it easier to talk about and to reason about, even though I "know" the plant doesn't "intend" anything. Dennett would probably have a word or two to say about this.

however, what I think is really interesting is the way that, in the back of my mind, I can't shake the thought that, really, it's "just" a plant, that its movements are "merely" the result of chemical process, that there's no "real" intentionality there. why not? the answer that comes to mind: it doesn't have a nervous system. most species that are said to have intentionality have some sort of nervous system. but what's behind that anatomical system? it's a chemical (and in most cases electrical) process, possibly not all that much different from the chemical processes at work in directing a plant toward the sun. now I'm not trying to say that, because we are based largely on chemical processes (which we would approach with what Dennett calls the physical stance) that we are not intentional. I also realize that, despite the fact that both forms of life are based on chemical processes, a plant can't very well learn a language or perform abstract symbol manipulation, and there is certainly an argument to be had over whether or not plants can communicate with one another (this argument probably hinges on how you define communication). so, yes, there are certain cognitive capacities generally associated with intentionality that plants lack.

what I want to argue is not that we don't have intentionality, but rather that, in a certain sense, plants do. insofar as we talk about them and treat them as intentional life forms, I think they should be considered as such. it doesn't really matter if they are or aren't intentional, what's important is whether or not we perceive them as intentional. I suspect that, by viewing plants as entities with wants, needs, desires, goals, and intentions, people may be more inclined to take steps toward preserving and protecting the ecologies in which those plants survive. how does one encourage people to adopt an intentional stance towards plants? I suspect that the best way to do this might be through the cultivation of plants in home, community, and/or office gardens, but I'm sure there are lots of other options. once someone has adopted this stance, how does one leverage it to encourage them to make environmentally conscious decisions? the answer to this question is likely far more complex, but I suspect that, rather than guiding thought specifically, in involves encouraging people to reflect on their experiences with plants, their approach to those experiences, and what that approach broadly writ might imply abouttheir general behavior towards the environment.

I realize that the argument here looks something like Swiss cheese, and I'd love to have people point out all the holes in it. is it fooling to encourage taking the intentional stance towards plants? might such a stance not lead easily to environmentally conscious decisions? could it be possible to instill such reflections without actually needing to have people do gardening? is encouraging reflection the best way to approach the problem or is there a better route?

autoethnovideography

2007-07-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

at CSCL today, Ricki Goldman was talking about, among other things, the e-generation. this was the idea that through technologies like blogs, flicrk, YouTube, etc., everyone was becoming an ethnographer. my first reaction was, well, how is this different from previous mass media technologies? certainly, when the printing press was invented, people were able to write their culture in a way not previously possible. I think the technologies she's discussing, though, are not just a change of scale but a qualitative change, as well. a talk (my notes) I saw by Marc Davis echoed similar sentiments along these lines.

however, I also started wondering, perhaps everyone, at least in some sense, is really becoming an ethnographer. to some extent, aren't they writing their own culture? is YouTube effectively something like an autoethnovideography? (there's your neologism of the day, kids) furthermore, with people creating all of these digital cultural artifacts, how do the role and activities of the ethnographer change? meta was recently talking about photos and ethnography, and I wonder if the photos, video, and media a culture produces about itself might affect the way an ethnographer works. I suspect people who are more versed and practiced in ethnography would have more things (and more intelligent things) than I to say about the issue, so I'll stop for now at posing the question and leave the answering to others.

update (2007-07-24): I actually got a chance to chat with Ricki a bit about her thoughts on this topic, i.e., how do things like YouTube, flickr, MySpace, etc. change the roles and activities of the ethnographer? I didn’t take notes or anything, but I’ll try to paraphrase from memory. part of the discussion we had was about how, while people may be massively inscribing their culture in these various digital media, what their doing is not ethnography. while the primary task is writing culture, the ethnography is not, as many have noted, a veridical textual representation of that culture, but rather the culture as seen through the lens of the ethnographer. ethnography is not only a form of reportage, is it fundamentally interpretive (perhaps this ties back to my earlier thoughts on naturalists’ interpretation). generally when people make the sort of digital cultural artifacts that appear on YouTube or flickr, they may be inscribing aspects of their culture, but they are not doing an interpretation of that culture. I think this resonates with Rubikzube's comment below that when he posts photos of his vacation to flickr, he's not really doing ethnography; he's not engaged in a culturally interpretive act. Ricki said that she was interested in encouraging people to be more interpretive (perhaps reflective) in such activities, partially as another way of learning about their own culture and themselves.

she also talked about an interesting experience she had while doing video analysis of some classroom activity. one of the students said to her, “Ricki, you can’t see the classroom.” “what do you mean?” she asked. the student replied, “the teachers are different when you’re here. give me the camera and I’ll show you what the classroom is really like.” this isn’t just a matter of the presence of a researcher affecting the behavior of the teachers (and probably the students, for that matter). it’s a matter of perspective. ethnography is about capturing the emic perspective. what this student was arguing is that, when you give the camera to the members of the culture, that’s when you really get to see the emic perspective. this is what YouTube and flickr do, they capture the emic perspective from the emic perspective. I doubt this means that anthropologists and ethnographers of digital culture will be replaced by autoethnovideographers from within that culture (partly due to the interpretive nature of ethnography mentioned above), but I think it means that these media will become invaluable for ethnographic studies of that culture.

friday shuffle

2007-06-30T16:57:00.000-07:00

ok, it's actually saturday, so sue me. it's been a while since I actually thought about this on a Friday, so here's this week's "Friday" shuffle.

Another Bag of Bricks - Flogging Molly - Drunken Lullabies
Dexter - The W's - Fourth From the Last
The Unforgiven II - Metallica - Reload
Tangled - Maroon 5 - Songs About Jane
In The Pit - Reel Big Fish - Why Do They Rock So Hard?
Original Medley form Smash Bros. - New Japan Philharmonic - Smash Bros DX Concert
More - Rx Bandits - Those Damn Bandits
Gimme The Light - Sean Paul - Dutty Rock
Tell That Mick He Just Made My List Of Things To Do Today - Fall Out Boy - Take This To Your Grave
It's All Understood - Jack Johnson - Brushfire Fairytales
If You Leave - Good Charlotte - Not Another Teen Movie Soundtrack

ah, who doesn't love Fall Out Boy's song titles?

demo ability

2007-06-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

giving demonstrations has been a large part of the culture of my graduate career. the first summer I spent working in the research lab, we had a demo almost every other day, if not every day, incorporating new features that had been added to the project. this became an incredibly motivating force to actually get things done, and it led to what I think was a pretty fantastic end product.

however, these regular demos don’t just happen during production as an impetus to complete your work. pretty much every week during our group meetings, people are asked if anyone has a demo, and it’s quite common that at least one member of the group has something to show. it also happens on a very regular basis that someone will come through for a tour, and we’ll give them a demo. sometimes this is planned well in advance, as when VIPs come through, and sometimes it’s much more ad hoc, because someone knows someone in the administration and got a tour. basically, the point is, we demo all the time.

danah a while back included, in a list of "secrets to success," to demo regularly. both our lab’s demoing practices and danah’s advice are influenced in large part by the demo culture of MIT’s Media Lab, as noted by Alan Blackwell in a great paper on metaphor in design. here, I want to consider the ramifications of this practice. how does constantly demoing affect our research? does demoing make you better at doing your research, or just talking about it? does it make you worse at doing research? does it bias us towards certain sorts of projects and away from others? are there certain types of projects that are more or less amenable to demos, and if so, how does this impact those projects?

one of the things I’ve noticed about demoing is that it can serve as a litmus test for ideas. if you can’t give a decently engaging demo, it means either that your idea or the tech is half baked, or that the idea itself might not be that good. furthermore, if your idea is decent but half baked, the act of demoing forces you to think it through, sift out the junk, and distill out the core valuable idea. in this respect, though, I wonder if doing demos is necessarily any more useful than giving talks or even to getting your ideas critiqued. furthermore, in a critique, rather than presenting your ideas to more-or-less random people, you’re getting generally constructive feedback from people whose opinions you usually trust.

however, the contrition of ideas that don’t stand up to being demoed isn’t necessarily a good thing. by its very nature, the format of a demo is a short (generally 5 to 10 minute) interaction. if the ideas or concepts with which you’re working are fairly complex incorporate a significant amount of previous work, it might not be feasible to present the idea in its entirety in the time allotted. another difficult arising from these short time frames is that systems intended for extended use cannot really be experienced within 10 minutes. for example, Bill Gaver et al.’s home health horoscope only produces a horoscope once a day, and it is intended to reflect large-scale patterns of activity and long-term trends occurring within the home. giving a demonstration of such a system in a 5 to 10 minute window would not only be nearly impossible but would likely lead to misunderstanding about the intended use of the system and its effect on a family.

I realize that being able to give an elevator speech (a quick one to two sentence synopsis) of one’s research is important, but I’m hesitant to say that not being able to pitch one’s research effectively within a short time frame means that the research isn’t worthwhile. furthermore, while many of the demos we give are at academic conferences, a large number of them are also to various VIPs, including elected representatives, corporate CEOs, various governmentally appointed officials, and all sorts of people who aren’t a central part of the research community. as danah argued, being able to talk to just about anyone is also an important skill, but I don’t think you should expect a senator to necessarily be interested in, say, phenomenological approaches to ubiquitous computing.

which raises another point about the sort of research biased by demoing. giving a demo is something that pretty much can only be done when one is constructing an artifact, and usually only with an interactive artifact. physicists or historians who often construct theories or analyses or critiques cannot necessarily give a demo of their work to a corporate CEO, not only because it’s difficult to get a CEO interested in quantum superposition or deconstructionism, but also because demos almost be definition revolve around a physical artifact, and (which the exception of high energy labs like CERN) quantum physics or performance theory don’t necessarily generate the type of physical artifacts amenable to public demonstration.

on the one hand, an emphasis on demos may discourage more theoretical research. on the other hand, it can over-emphasize building stuff at the expense of considering the motivations for that stuff. Blackwell has discussed some of the ways in which demonstrations act as reifications of the theories or guiding principles (his specific focus is on metaphors) behind them, such that, if your theory can lead to the creation of effective artifacts exhibited through demonstrations, these artifacts act to reify that theory. thus, we end up supporting theories that can lead to the construction of demonstrable artifacts, and less likely to support theories that do not.

despite the above critiques, I think demos can be a quite useful and positive force in the development of technology, especially interactive technologies. the act of demoing helps one refine one’s ideas, develops the ability to present one’s research to a wide variety of audiences, and can ultimately help lead to better interactions with technology. however, there are also drawbacks to a demonstration culture, such as the MIT Media Lab’s “demo or die” slogan (which is strikingly similar to the mantra of “publish or perish” that I have heard used to describe academia, but that parallel is beyond the scope of this already longish post). ultimately, the purpose of this post is not to argue that the uptake of demonstration should be considered harmful. rather, the point is to consider some of the ramifications of emphasizing demos, both positive and negative, so as to be aware and reflective about the incorporation of demonstrations into research practice.

Chomsky the activist

2007-06-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

a couple weeks ago, my girlfriend and I rented the U.S. vs. John Lennon, a documentary about Lennon’s vocalism against Vietnam and how it drew him undesired attention from the Nixon administration and the FBI. the film was rather interesting, especially in terms of some of the uncanny parallels between the political climate surrounding that conflict and our current situation with respect to Iraq. if you have a chance, I recommend seeing the film.

however, one thing struck me as particularly interesting and bordering between amusing and disturbing. the film includes interviews with several individuals who were involved with Lennon, his music, his activism, and his politics, as well as those who have studied his work. most of these people are billed as “Journalist” or “Author” or “Historian” or some such. then on the screen appears Noam Chomsky, who is billed not as a professor or as a linguist, but as an activist. yes, I realize that Chomsky had very strong political views, but it seems strange to me to bill him as an activist. lots of other interviewees were billed as “Artist and Activist” or “Writer and Activist,” but Chomsky was not “Linguist and Activist,” he was just "Activist." I also realize that, given the context of the film, portraying Chomsky as an activist probably makes more sense than portraying him as an academic, except that his academics and his activism go more or less hand in hand, just as with artist activists. this makes me wonder how pop culture and history will treat current academics who have interests with political ramifications. will George Lakoff be billed as Professor, Linguist, Author, Cognitive Scientist, or as Activist? similarly, will Al Gore be billed as Former Vice President, as Filmmaker (he did win an Oscar), or as Environmental Activist? one could ask of many people I know, is s/he an academic, a researcher, a designer an ethnographer, a computer scientist, or a privacy/cultural activist?

I suspect that this whole enterprise of labeling a person is almost certainly misguided from the outset, as a single label rarely captures the entirely of a person’s work or identity, especially people who are involved in such wide ranging, disparate activities as those listed here. however, that doesn’t prevent labeling from happening, and I think paying attention to the labels that get assigned is an important way of gauging how certain individuals are perceived by various communities. furthermore, these labels can actually alter someone’s identity. in this case, Chomksy is not an academic, he did not do some of the seminal work on generative grammar, he did not found an influential and dominant school of linguistics. he is an activist.

academics are boring writers

2007-05-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

from a review of Mapping Biology Knowledge by Kathleen Fisher...

Surprisingly, as academics, the authors write pretty well - crisp, succinct, and most of all, not boring.

wow. even though I've been accused of using this blog as an excuse to sound stuck up, I hope my academic writing can break what is apparently a trend of being boring.

speaking of writing, back to the survey paper...

conceptual HCI

2007-05-13T09:36:00.000-07:00

a couple weeks ago, I was in a workshop at CHI on HCI and New Media Arts focusing on methods and evaluation. the whole thing was very interesting and brought out some interesting tensions between what it means to evaluate HCI and what it means to evaluate art. one of the more interesting notions that came up drew on the notion of conceptual art to ask if something similar could exist in HCI. could you have conceptual HCI, or a conceptual UI, that wasn't just bad HCI?

the one example of which I thought was a click-free interface called don't click it (thanks Matt), that is, a GUI where one doesn't click at all. if there is such a thing as conceptual HCI, this probably comes pretty close. I don't know if it could ever work on a large scale, but the whole point of rethinking the modality of point-and-click interfaces to just a point interface is, I think, a potentially useful one. in a point-only interface, what other interesting methods of interaction might you have? does this possibly open up more space for gestural inputs? are there existing devices that don't offer an input analogous to clicking that could benefit from such a framing?

if something can get us thinking along lines like these, I suspect it qualifies as conceptual HCI.

what, panopticon? you don't say!

2007-05-09T19:08:00.000-07:00

(via Ars) according to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger from Harvard's School of Government, argues that, due to the ways digital technologies are used to record tons of minutiae about people's daily lives, society is headed towards a Benthamist panopticon. this is not a particularly surprising argument, and others have touched on this theme quite a bit. the suggestion in this "modest proposal" is that technologies be built, by default, to forget. that is, logging technologies, e.g. those on the iTunes music store website that collect customer info, would automatically wipe that info after a legally prescribed period of time, say, a couple years. files created by digital cameras would self-delete after a set time period, where the user of the camera gets to determine the length of that time period. it's true, forgetting is a very important part of the way that our society functions, and plays a role in smoothing over lots of possible awkward social situations. when you stop forgetting, you stop being able to levy plausible deniablility arguments about, say, what you were or weren't doing when your significant other claims to have caught you emailing another lover. furthermore, if everything is remembered, then memories lose their preciousness. it doesn't matter that I remebered your birthday, because I didn't actually remember, my electronic daily planner emailed me to remind me that it was your birthday. I think there are all sorts of aspects of memory that cannot be emulated by digital technologies, especially those parts of memory associated with subjective experience, so I doubt that the preciousness of human memory will ever be totally eroded.

the problem is, I'm just not convinced that what we need is a technological solution to this technology-induced problem. when the technology of writing was introduced, it fundamentally changed the way human memory functions. no longer did we live in an world of fleeting and ephemeral spoken word, but we could capture and preserve that word. print technologies only further reified the word as an object rather than a spoken event, and remembering became less important. were there similar debates when writing came about? indeed, Plato argues through Socrates in Phaedrus that writing, among other things, destroys memory because it allows things to be written down rather than simply remembered, and that writing is inhuman because it does not allow for the natural give-and-take of verbal communication. similarly, with the advent of pocket calculators, teachers and parents argue that children's mathematical abilities would be dulled by their reliance on the calculator as a crutch. in Orality and Literacy, Ong argues that while these things may be true, in the case of writing, by not having to remember everything, humans were able to engage in previously unachievable analytic thought. science, he argues, would not have been possible without writing. Ong goes into a much greater exploration of the subject in his book, as well as making some conjectures about the potential impacts of digital technologies (some of with I quite disagree with). it's worth the read if you're interested in such things.

back to the matter at hand, I'm not arguing that we need to just sit back, accept the fact that everything is remembered, and figure out how as a society we are going to adapt to this change. I would agree that computational systems are fundamentally different than the technologies of writing and printing with respect to memory. namely, writing and print allow us to record things, but digital technologies enable retrieval, and at continually improving speed and accuracy. thus, while we might have been able to remember things externally with books, search-type technologies enable an entirely new form of access to these external memories. essentially, the question becomes, how do we decide what gets remembered, and when do we decide to remember it? Gillian Hayes has done some really interesting work on systems that constantly archive everything, for example social interactions in a public space, but automatically delete the archives after 30 minutes if no one says, I want to remember that. her work is really top notch, and I highly recommend checking it out. while it might not always be possible to know that you want to remember something until after the fact, it certainly has benefits over the common alternative. that is, the approach of archiving everything, but only allowing people to find something specific for which they are looking. this later take leans much more on the side of the panopticon, but you don't run the risk of accidentally not remembering something important. neither approach is perfect, but I think both are better than devices that forcibly, automatically forget after a specified amount of time.

CHI - experience evaluation SIG

2007-05-06T12:31:00.000-07:00

last week was CHI, and there are about a bajillion things that came up that I really want to blog about. the first one that's actually made it out of my head and onto my keyboard was about the SIG I went to on evaluating experience-based HCI, organized by Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Kirsten Boehner, Jarmo Laaksolahti, and Anna Ståhl. due to delayed Caltrains, I didn't get there until a half hour into the SIG, so I missed pretty much all of the introductions. however, it was a nenjoyable, exciting thing of which to be a part, and I feel like there was some truly useful discussion. the participants at the SIG broke up into 3 small groups, each of which chose to address one particular question. my group (including, among others, Michael Muller, Janet Vertesi, Ryan Aipperspach, and Sara Ljungblad) took on, "What are good criteria for an evaluation of experience-focused HCI?" essentially, this is a question of meta-evaluation, that is, how do we evaluate our methods for evaluating experience-focused HCI. the first bit below is a number of criteria that our group thought would be good for evaluating evaluation methods. below that is just a transcription of my notes from the SIG. most of these are from little comments jotted in the margins of the sheet of paper they gave us, so they come in no particular order. the regular type face are my actual notes, and the italics are comments I added after the fact.

What are good criteria for an effective evaluation method?

- Does it highlight the role of the researcher? of the observed?

- Does it elicit rich stories? think descriptions? (I think there are interesting problems with elicitation here that tie back into the first point)

- Does it help to construct a faithful analysis or account or report?

- Does it inspire users/designers/researchers/companies?

- Does it open up interpretations? (closing out isn’t necessarily bad)

- Does it make sure not to generate graphs?

historicizing objectivity – Daston and Galison (Representations, 40, 81-128) describe how objectivity means different things at different times

standpoint epistemology and The Voice from Nowhere

experiences in the moment vs after the moment. how to get people back into the moment after the fact? can use reflective visualizations. rather people to discuss around an artifact

highlight the reflexive nature of technology (is/can technology itself be reflexive? reflective?)

challenges and opportunities for subjectivity

expose subjectivity

the process of an experience vs the product of an experience (I suspect this might be a distinction between having an experience and the memory of the experience. hm, is the act of remembering an experience itself, possibly quite different and distinct from the original experience being remembered? in experience-focused HCI/design, perhaps we could/should support not only having experiences but also the experience of remembering those experiences)

evaluating experiences as storytelling, plumbing a collection of episodic memories (the notion of stories and narratives came up a lot in our small group)

elicit multiple, different stories. different experiences for different users. retain multiple persectives. (emic perspective, multiple realities. there’s almost certainly a connection here to something a whole lot bigger about multiple thought styles, epistemological pluralism, different cognitive framings, etc.)

literary theory often evaluates texts over and over. why do we not return repeatedly to the same UX to understand it more fully or in different ways? (perhaps this connects to the above point, in that HCI doesn’t particularly value having lots of different perspectives, so studying the same thing again is seen as a waste of time)

often talk about the “representative” user. how is a particular user representative? statistically? politically (e.g., elected union representative)? who chooses the representative and how?

different criteria to evaluate different evaluation methods for different experiences

evaluation as developing a sensibility rather than determining progress – “the tyranny of progress” (a distinction that came up in the HCI and New Media workshop in which I participated was that of evaluation vs analysis, that evaluation might be more along the lines of judging something as good or bad, while analysis is more about understand something. those perhaps might not be the right terms, but I suspect it might be an important distinction to make)

process of presenting results of experience evaluation: exposure -> awareness -> empathy -> advocacy -> change

a member of another group said “when we’re in flow, we’re having an experience,” that flow can be one indicator of an experience (this raises the interesting notion that we might sometimes be having an experience and might at other times not. I’m not sure how much I’d agree with this notion that we might at some times not be having an experience, but I’d certainly agree that we have different types of experiences at different times, and that when trying to evaluate experience you might only be interested in certain types of experiences.)

I'd love to hear others' thoughts/comments/questions about this stuff. I feel like it's an important direction for HCI to pursue, and I think that having discussions about how to pursue it most effectively is an important aspect of making experience-based evaluation more accepted and central to the HCI community.

on what we should spend our efforts

2007-04-25T23:23:00.001-07:00

a little while back, I got into a conversation with a friend, Alex, about research. we were both sort of bemoaning the directions that AI is pursuing/has pursued. I was making the argument that building a general learning machine, or general human-like intelligence, or whatever you want to call the grand vision for AI, isn't necessarily the best use of our time. not only does it seem (at least currently) like an untenable goal, but I'm not entirely convinced that creating such an intelligent machine would be of use. Alex then asked on what research efforts we should be spending our human, monetary, and temporal resources. after a bit of consideration, I came up with three things. what follows is roughly a transcript of the chat log from our conversation. I've added a few things, but this is largely how my side of the conversation unfolded.

ok, I think there are three main areas where I'd like to see work done

1) the mind-body problem, reconciling objectivist/subjectivist myths, and breaking out of Cartesian dualism

2) interdisciplinarity and epistemological pluralism

3) sustainable design, environmental psychology, and reducing/reversing global climate change

1) is something that's sort of plagued science for hundreds of years - how does our subjective experience of consciousness arise from the physical reality of our brains. we've done lots of brain mapping, but we're still pretty far off from understanding how what we experience as daily life is linked to our physical world. I might posit that the physical world can only explain so much, and that seeing a strong Cartesian split between the mind and the body (me in here vs the world out there that I'm studying) as science tends to do might be harmful in gaining a better understanding of the world. we should look for ways to advance our understanding that might not fit into the traditional scientific paradigm. this is sort of a segue into 2).

2) has to do with advancing knowledge. any theory is a lens; some theories put certain aspects of a situation into focus while they blur or entirely occlude others. rather than trying to come up with a single theory or model for the entire world (quantum-gravity in physics (or string theory or whatever), a theory of complex systems, etc.), we should look for ways that different theoretical approaches can complement one another. all models all wrong, some are just more wrong than others (that's a quote from some George Box, a statistician).

3) is really, to some extent, the moral imperative of our time. there absolutely no doubt that we are very rapidly nearly destroying the livability of this planet. if we want a home for our children and the future of our species, we absolutely need to put as much effort as possible into salvaging the environment. this is both from a technical standpoint and from a social standpoint. video cameras are smaller, lighter, faster, have more battery life, take higher quality pictures, and are cheaper than they were even 2 or 3 years ago, yet we don't see this level of innovation with cars. other countries have improved fuel efficiency, but in the US... let's just say that the model-T got 28 mpg. we can do better. cars are a convenient example, but it's not just cars, it's alternative energy in general. but it's not just a technological solution for the problem. society has to support this and, as a whole, think it's really important. I bike almost everywhere that I can; I choose dr's offices and stores that are within biking distance; I live close to campus. my girlfriend bikes to work at least 3 days a week. if everyone made small changes like this, it would have almost as much an effect, if not more so, than government regulation. if every person changed one bulb in their house from traditional incandescent to energy efficient, it would reduce annual emissions by something like 10%, and that's just one bulb. understanding individual and social motivations to engender these sorts of changes will, I believe, be crucial in preserving the environment.

after that, we got into a discussion about how the general thinking machine of AI's grand vision might be a useful, integral, or possible necessary part of achieving parts of each of those goals. however, that unfortunately got cut short and we never resumed the conversation. however, I thought that archiving the above here would be sort of a good way to capture/archive what I think is important right now, as well as hopefully generate some discussion with those who might (dis)agree.

do the friday shuffle

2007-04-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

meta started doing this a couple weeks ago, and I thought it was a cool idea, but never remembered to do it myself. basically, go into iTunes, fire up party shuffle, let it select from your entire library, and list the first ten songs that come up. here are mine for today.

Boy on a String :: Jars of Clay :: Jars of Clay
All My Life :: Foo Fighters
go go cactus man :: Yoko Kanno, :: Cowboy Bebop OST 3
Turpentine Chaser :: Dashboard Confessional :: Swiss Army Romance
A Minor Variation :: Billy Joel :: River of Dreams
The Squid :: Zox :: Take Me Home
Saturday :: Fall Out Boy :: Warped Tour 2005 Compilation
Little Humans :: Logan Belle
Destination Ursa Major :: Superdrag :: Regretfully Yours
Again :: Off White Noise :: Our Demo
Kefka's Theme :: Nobuo Uematsu :: Final Fantasy VI

Off White Noise was a great indied band from UCF where I went to college. they're now tearing it up in Boston, where at least two of the band members (I think) are/were in grad school. I actually did some trombone playing for a recording of one of their songs before we all left Orlando. cool guys, check them out some time.

someone with a clue

2007-04-18T23:04:00.000-07:00

I just read a great piece about the horrible VA Tech shootings (via Liz Losh). the author, Siva Vaidhyanathan makes some great points.

As a culture, we are very bad at thinking about technology. We look to it either as something to fear or as a panacea for the flaws of the human condition. Technology is neither. It is merely an extension of our own wills and capabilities.

this is great, especially since I'll be presenting a paper in a couple weeks entitled "Questioning the Technological Panacea" that critiques a rhetorical trend to portray technology for the solution to any sort of problem, be it social, economical, educational, whatever. I'm not arguing against technological solutions, but rather that we might be better served by a pause for consideration before blugdeoning every problem we see with the technology hammer. not only as a culture are we bad at thinking about technology, but perhaps even the technology designers are rather bad at it in their own way.

it goes on

After 9/11 we wasted billions on biometric and data-mining technologies to protect ourselves from rare and limited dangers like hijackings, anthrax epidemics and chemical weapon attacks. Yet we defunded efforts to attack real killers like cancer and real lifesavers like public transportation.

beautiful. I don't know if the point could be made better.

go read the rest of the piece, it's all good stuff.

76 trombones

2007-04-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

when I was 9 years old, I began playing the trombone. I played through the later part of elementary school, all through middle school and high school, and minored in music in college with an emphasis in trombone performance. unfortunately, when I got to grad school, I wasn't able to keep up with practicing, but I take it out from time to time just to remind myself how much I enjoy playing. recently, when recounting to Danyel how I played in trombone choir in college, how the tonal range of a trombone is strikingly similar to that of the human voice, and how in high school I played with a group called 76 Trombones in allusion to the Music Man number (which, for the 4th of July, did have damn near 76 trombones on stage together), he couldn't help but chuckle. "dude," he said (I'm paraphrasing here), "I understand that the trombone is a completely serious instrument, but imagine in everything you just said, replace 'trombone' with 'kazoo' and you'll have some idea how it sounded to me." I understand that people don't usually think of the trombone as the most sonorous instrument in the orchestra, but it really is a beautiful sound when played well.

turns out, this seems to be the general perception of trombones. in a recent LA Times article, the author says that a group of 22 trombones playing a bossa nova arrangement of "Fly Me to the Moon" is "surprisingly mellow and full." why should it be surprising? I guess the general populous just has this picture of trombones being more of a gag-style instrument than something that actually belongs in the London Symphony Orchestra. what a shame.

an etymological interlude

2007-04-02T21:16:00.000-07:00

so, the academic unit where I'm doing my Ph.D. is called the Department of Informatics. I'd never really thought about it until a little while ago, but what do you call someone who does informatics? biology is practices by biologists, chemistry by chemists, mathematics by mathematicians, statistics by statisticians, therapy by therapists, etc. so, what does one call a practitioner of informatics? I think there are two distinct possibilities:

informatician

informaticist

this quandry was started when David Kay, for whom I was TAing last quarter, used the former term. it threw me off guard, as it took me a moment to parse it. after having done so, I thought, how cumbersome. first, how does one pronounce that? he said it with a small emphasis on the first syllable and a large emphasis on the fourth, the same emphatic pattern as mathematician. this isn't too bad, but it ends up making the "o" pronounced with that soft vowel sound denoted by an up-side-down "e," which I think masks the root word "information." I think the latter alternative, with an an emphasis only on the third syllable, is easier to pronounce, is clearer about the proper pronounciation, and pays clearer homage to the root word.

when I started thinking about that, I said, hm, I wonder what the etymology of information is. turns out it's from a participial form of the Latin informare (which is actually the origin of "inform," the root for "information"), meaning to form into, implicitly to form into a shape. I thought this was particularly striking, especially when one considers the way that one interpretation of informatics, according to Bill, is "the process of transforming data into information." the etymology would seem to indicate not only that informatics could refer to the process of informing, but also the study of that process. interesting indeed.

however, this gets us no closer to the goal of determining the proper form of the word to refer to one who practices informatics. so, I looked into the two suffixes, -ist and -ian. on first glance, it seems that -ist is more appropriate; "one that performs a specialized action ... a specialist in a specified art, science, or skill," as opposed to "one relating to, belonging to, or resembling." dig a little further into the etymology. -ist is from the Latin noun-forming suffix -ista, -istes, which is from the Greek agent noun suffix -istEs, and I believe an agent noun is exactly what we're trying to form. -ian, on the other hand, is from the Latin -ianus, meaning of or belonging to, hence noun forms like "Bostonian" or "Washingtonian." however, -ianus was, it seems (see the third bullet point under that link), used to refer to the original family name of an adopted person, quite literally indicating from whom they had come and to whom they belonged. why, then, do mathematician, statistician, physician, and a number of others use the -ian (or its derivative, -ician) suffix? it could be that these are fields to which one can belong or from which one can come, in a way that fields that get the -ist suffix are less focused on being a well-defined group and more focused on the object of study. in this way, it would be appropriate to say that someone was from mathematics, but not that someone was from physics. however, I suspect that this is far more likely an etymological artifact than as aspect that carries great amounts of meaning.

given all these considerations, I think that "inforamiticist" is a much more appropriate, if not accurate, form of the word. what do you think, which form do you prefer? or would you possibly suggest an alternate formation?

laser "tag"

2007-03-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

no, this is not about a bunch of adolescents running around in a darkened warehouse or forest or something shining laser beams at each other. rather, it's about an interesting, novel form of graffiti (from Brian, via Mom). laser tag is a system that allows graffiti artists to "spray" their work onto the side of a building using a laser pen. the first minute or so of the video will give you the idea. there's some sort of interaction with the police, but I can't tell exactly how it went down from the video. while this would give a graffiti artist a much larger and more visible canvas than usual, it's also very non-permanent, which is either good or bad, depending on your perspective.

technovangelism

2007-03-12T18:26:00.000-07:00

this article on ars struck me as rather interesting. why is it that the western/developed world sees the need to force their technologies (and implicitly their values) on the rest of the world. I'm not saying that everyone being online is necessarily a bad thing, but it's not necessarily a good thing, either. especially when we consider that, afaik, there's still no great way to get rid of the incredibly toxic waste from computers. I feel a bit like the Takers in Quinn's Ishmael, forcing my developments on the rest of the world. what if those people in third world countries don't want to be online? maybe they would be better served by mobile phone apps and WiMax (or whatever) than a "proper" internet connection. maybe they don't want to be brought into the technological era at all. how would you even go about deciding such a thing? how would you properly determine that a culture or society wanted to be leavers? I'm not quite sure, but I'm not convinced that it involves giving lots of money to folks for setting up computer labs in third world countries.

where lies the uncanny valley?

2007-02-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

a while back, when the PS3 was first being launched, I had a bit of a rant about the over emphasis of graphical fidelity in games and lack of emphasis on the behavioral components. I think that the comparison between the sales of the Wii and PS3 are a testament to the fact that gameplay ultimately trumps graphics and pretty volumetric lighting. however, because making faster, better, prettier graphics is relatively easy, as compared to making dynamic characters that truly interact with the player, people are doing just that. in a recent BBC article, David Knunkley of Obsidian Entertainment says that game characters are currently in the uncanny valley; "they're too close to real, but not quite real." graphically, I think he's probably right.

however, I would argue that the horizontal axis of "likeness" in Mori's uncanney valley graph is not a single dimension but is very high dimensional. it certainly involves visual appearance, but there's a lot more to "humanness" than appearance. the ability to interact with characters in a non-scripted way, the ability of characters to have believable emotional reactions both to PCs' and NPCs' actions, the ability of the character to make autonomous decisions that can impact the player, etc. in some regards, this begs the question of how close games lie to an interactive narrative. are you playing through a story, or is a story evolving based on the ways that you interact with the characters? furthermore, is humanness the quality towards which character developers should strive? consider the success of the WII, powered by what is essentially an overclocked Game Cube processor. the graphics are far from stunning, and HD support is limited, and yet you can easily acquire a PS3, while getting a hold of a Wii is a slight bit more challenging. point being, super amazing, photorealistic graphics are cool, but they are not the end all and be all of games, and the Wii's success is just one example of a focus on developing new player experiences.

notes from Marc Davis

2007-02-06T22:51:00.000-08:00

last week, I went to this panel at the HumaniTech conference on Text and Image : From Book History to “The Book is History.” the panel included talks from Daniel J. Clancey on Google’s book search, David S.H. Rosenthal about Stanford Library’s LOCKSS project, Marc Davis on Yahoo! Research’s projects about social mobile computing, and Ramesh Jain on organic books. unfortunately, I didn’t catch Ramesh Jain’s talk, but I did get to see the others, and all were quite interesting, if for very different reasons. I was actually struck the most by Marc Davis’ talk, because he essentially got up and said, “all this talk about text and books is cool, but we’re ignoring the ‘text’ [in the post-structuralist sense] that people author everyday of their lives as they create temporal patterns from their movement through physical and social space.” (this isn’t an exact quote, but it’s largely what I took away from the talk). see as my research of late has been focusing on some computational linguistic stuff, which is obviously about text as written words, I must admit I had a bit of a gut reaction to this. on the one hand, I think the stuff Marc Davis and others are doing on mobile social computing is not only fascinating but really important. I agree that we should be hesitant about the amount of importance we place on written texts; there’s certainly a lot about physical embodiment that they don’t capture. however, at the same time, written words as text are not going away, and I don’t think in our newfound fervor for traces spatio-social-temporal traces we should ignore textual analysis.

what I’d like to do here is just post my stream-of-conscious style notes from the Marc Davis’s talk, partially to summarize and partially as an exercise for myself to go back over his talk. I have a bunch of comments about this, but I wanted to contextualize my comments by giving a synopsis of the talk first. however, trying to do that all in one post would be a bit too monstrous. so, for now, here are my notes from the talk, with my analysis soon to follow.

Marc Davis – Social Media Guru from Yahoo! Research Berkeley
studied with Wolfgang Iser, who wrote The Act of Reading
shaped by post-structuralism and reader response theory
how many people read or wrote text today? how many people looked at multimedia (photo, audio, and/or video) today? how many people authored multimedia today? trying to change that, so that authoring multimedia is just as much a part of daily life as is authoring text.
image and text are very related
Eisenstein (“father” montage) – a sequence of images as a form of writing
[computer] programs as a form of writing, computational forms of writing
moving from garage cinema (title of a previous ACM multimedia paper) to social media
not a web of documents or text
it’s a book “made out of people”
this is an entirely different set of business models, where in your customers are your suppliers
Yahoo answers – you don’t want to search for some string, you want somebody to answer your question. trying to connection question askers to answerers. connect everyone in a large knowledge network.
citing a figure about the amount of information on the web and the number of people in the world, “you have more than 10 stories to tell.” connecting people via the stories the tell.
“not just information, but knowledge.”
from cybernetics to social media
cybernetics designs a network to connect human and computer elements
HCI comes in part from human factors, focuses on the human part of the network
the “PC interlude,” a focus on the interface between a single computer and a single user
social media, web 2.0, billions of people, 2 billion cell phones, all connected together in a large cybernetic type network
the challenge is how to incentivize human participation in this network
citing B.J. Fogg, how do we use mobile phones to influence human behavior?
with the time and energy people collectively spend playing solitaire online everyday, we could build the empire state building. how do you harness this human and rhetorical power?
there’s a lot of talk about the internet, but there’s also this exciting thing called the world that’s going on
the world and the internet coming together
cell phones in a data and media network
more phones being sold than laptops
to think about humans and media, you have to think about phones
not just media consumption, but media production – the camera phone is the most important invention since cinema
it’s also a sensor, from which we can gather a wealth of data
by and large, a cell phone is a unique identifier for you as an individual human
Roland Barthes – “From Work to Text”
there is a binarism to our notion of what text is and what language is
a book itself is not real, the process of making the book real happens between the book and the mind
text is only experienced in an activity of production
what is in the library? is there knowledge in the library? is there information in the library?
the text is plural
text is a social space that coincides only with the practice of writing
“From Text to Web”
makes the invisible visible
record explicit and implicit human activity, large scale activity
analyze and interpolate to predict about missing information
people like to believe that they are unique, but sociologists know that we’re not all that different and that we’re very predictable, especially in groups
Yahoo logs 22 terabytes of data daily in user activity alone
social media metadata – where + when + who + what
from phone, you can get spatial, temporal, social (who I am and, via Bluetooth, who’s around me)
construct a path of human attention through spatio-temporal-social space
you can graph this in a 3 dimensional space, and you get nodes of attention, knots of overlap
at this panel, we’re all here together at a time and place with a shared activity and shared attention
while you may be thinking about other things, you are “attending” to this talk here and now with these other people
these are now nodal points of human activity that can be found from devices
we know when, where, who, and what (but not why)
this is a new form of writing, of text, the paths of people through data space is a new form of inadvertent, implicit, subconscious authorship
but what is this collective document we are authoring, and what can be done with it?
time is linear, but human activity has periodicity and cycles
you can track periodic pulses and cycles in people’s lives via the photos they take
if you want to predict who’s in the photo, you’re better off looking at patterns of behavior rather than the actual image
a photo taken right now during this panel might likely include your co-workers but not likely your children
photo LOI (level of interest), capturing (shared) attention
understand what’s interesting/important in a photo – shared attention likely indicates what’s important
with space, we’re used to thinking about maps, but we can also do hierarchical structure
social network structure of human relations becoming visible
can automatically suggest tags for images based on spatio-temporal-social metadata
uniquely identified humans via their phones, uniquely identified events, predict events to automatically add metadata
almost 11 million geo-coded flickr photos
can show a map at different zoom levels and overlay tags used in that area
evidence of human attention
like the Jewish Book of Life, creating a book of life of billions of people on the planet
but is it a panopticon?
no
it’s creating a new text in the Barthes sense
flickr is the “eyes of the world” that can see each other
this is the text being written everyday that will be read by future historians

that's it for my notes. stay tuned for my comments.

unintentional shrines

2007-01-24T14:21:00.000-08:00

I came across an interesting article in the LA Times this morning. when a MySpace user passes away, what happens to their MySpace? turns out, their friends end up making their MySpace into a shrine of sorts for the deceased. it's partly a memoir, partly a letter to the departed. this is really interesting in light of Genevieve Bell's recent ubicomp paper on techno-spiritual practices. in it, she talks, among other things, about how some Chinese families were creating online shrines to honor their dead ancestors and relatives, to some extent taking the place of traditional shrines and allowing those physically disparate to participate in remembering their family members.

I think that the MySpace shrines are particularly interesting in light of Genevieve's paper. the shrining aspect is really just a fall out of the permanance of MySpace pages, not something that was explicitly designed into the application. should MySpace do something to allow a user to be declared dead? how would you go about doing so? should MySpace account explicitly not be deleted after a period of inactivity so as to support this practice? or, should MySpace just continue on, effectively ignoring this emergent practice that their site supports?

counter consumption culture

2007-01-22T21:53:00.000-08:00

a recent Ars post got me thinking about some DRM and file-sharing stuff. at a recent conference in Cannes called Midem about how the music industry is approaching digital formats. what caught my eye was the following, partially a quote from Fritz Attaway, exec VP of the MPAA.

Attaway said, "When one consumes a movie by viewing it, there is some obligation to compensate those involved in making it."

This sounds fair, but immediately we must ask: just who does he expect to pay and how often? When I "consume" a Coke, I pay for it. When I consume another, I pay for it, too. Is this what Attaway means? What if I share my Coke with my wife? Do we both pay? What if what we're sharing isn't a traditional consumable good? 10 people can watch a movie at the same time, but 10 people can't really share a Coke at once.

this reminds me very strongly of a talk I saw by Mark Poster about p2p in all sorts of forms. he made a number of really great points about the nature of music/movie content and how it just doesn’t jive with our current perceptions and practices. for example, consider the above. if I buy a Coke from you, you no longer have it; there is only one instance of each individual Coke. however, if I buy a recording of a song from you, essentially a copy, you still have the song and can just as easily sell it to someone else as you can sell it to me. this really pokes a hole in the way that content associations (RIAA/MPAA) and current business models approach music. music’s nature as a commodity is very different from that of other products in a producer/consumer society, and as such it merits different business models.

beyond this, Poster argues, music is not just a commodity, but a cultural object. before certain modern technologies, music only existed in its performance. the only way to experience a piece of music was through a live concert, a cultural exchange between performer and audience. with the advent of the printing press, it became possible for the same piece of music to be widely distributed and have multiple instantiations, but each was unique.

this shift to the digital, however, brings a new sort of cultural object. with a CD, if I sell you my copy of the CD, I don’t have it anymore. however, with digitizing, I can create an exact or nearly exact copy of the CD and thus no longer need the original. furthermore, I don’t even need to give you the CD, I can just make you a copy of the CD, the digital version, or any number of other things. in a pseudo-Marxist twist, the progression of technology challenges and nearly overturns the commodification of music, taking it from something that must be produced and consumed to something that can be used and shared. Poster draws further implications about how, in cultures where music only passes via performance, each performer but his own variations on the music, and the ways in which this practice is mirrored in remixes, “mash-ups,” etc.

there are two side points of note here. first, with the advent of the printing press came the Scriptoria, an association of professional scribes who got permission to destroy printing presses and burn printed manuscripts. Poster claims that this is analogous to the way that the content industry associations go after grandmothers and little kids for music piracy. I’m not totally convinced that this is an exact parallel, but the is a comparison in that both are cases of professional organizations rejecting technological change because it drastically changes their way of business. second, one wonders if there isn’t a parallel here with Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, which catalogues many of the cognitive and cultural changes that occurred as a result of the transition from primarily oral societies to primarily chirographic ones. an upcoming ACM interactions article by Jonathan Grudin talks about the ways in which digital communication draws partially on written tradition but also partially on oral. however, I don’t think he really talks about the cultural aspects that go along with it. there are certainly cognitive and stylistic changes when moving from a written medium to a digital one. however, due to certain aspects of digital media (e.g. nearly instantaneous transmission of information, nearly effortless exact reproduction, widely available access, etc.), there are bound to also be cultural shifts, not only in the way the digital media are produced, but how they are used (not consumed).

tying this back to music and DRM, we see a new hybrid here. it has flavors of the “literary” age of music: exact reproductions of a performance, the ability to listen at will, etc. but it also has aspects of the “oral” age of music: easy passage between individuals, the ability to adapt and restyle music to one’s own personal preferences, etc. the question becomes, how do artists (not the music/movie industry, but artists) make a living off of this sort of cultural object? Poster suggests things like allowing for free distribution of original music content and earning revenue from things like cell phone ringtones, web advertising, personalization of content, etc. I also know many people don’t buy music, but prefer to invest in bands via concerts and merchandise. these may all be good answers, but they still require large corporations to enact. how does the small, unsigned indie band, film-maker, etc. make a buck to keep making decent, real music/movies while allowing their fans to experience their music/movies in a way that fits this new cultural style? my guess is that it will likely not have to do with advertising, with ringtones, with DRM, or with content distribution in general, but in some way leverages the way that music listening, sharing, and performance are all sites of cultural production.

apologizing for code

2007-01-16T22:28:00.000-08:00

a few months back, I attended two interdisciplinary events back-to-back. the first was a AAAI Symposium on Interaction and Emergence in Artificial Societies, and second was a workshop on gaming research held at UCI. Both were very cool events; among other things, the former renewed my faith in AI conferences, and the later gave me a chance to bounce early stages of dissertation ideas off of some really smart folks. however, there was an interesting trend at both of these events which was called to mind today by a discussion in a reading group on ubiquitous computing. I’ll get to that in a minute.

both of these events were very interdisciplinary: attendees ranged in backgrounds from computer graphics to game development to artificial life-based art to critical theory to education to AI to anthropology to law to software engineering. my long-standing impression about being interdisciplinary echoes recent advice from danah: being interdisciplinary is much, much harder. it’s not about being half of two parts, it’s about being two (or more) wholes. you have to know the intricate details of the technical aspects of a field like computer science, and you simultaneously have to be well versed in the rhetoric of fields like critical theory. why is it, then, that at both of these events, people apologized for delving into the technical details of their projects? at the AAAI symposium, one presenter accompanied a slide of code with an apology, stating that there would only be one slide with code, and it wouldn’t be that bad. at the game research workshop, a discussant prefaced a question about the implementation details of some multi-device graphics with an apology for focusing on the technical aspects. interestingly, though, when one of the artists at the AAAI symposium got up to present her work, she never once apologized for discussions of critical theory and the emphasis on reflection about the nature of machines in her work. why is this? why do interdisciplinary computer science researchers feel they must apologize for focusing on the technical aspects of their craft but do not seem to expect such apologies from collaborators coming from other fields? this might be going out on a limb, but I would like to put forth the suggestion that there is largely one rather ugly cause for all of this:

arrogance. computer scientists feel that what they do is harder, more challenging, more demanding, and more rigorous than work done by artists, anthropologists, or social scientists. it’s not that CS folks don’t want to bore everyone with all the technical minutiae of their latest project. rather, it’s that CS folks think their work is above people outside of their discipline and thus inaccessible to them. it’s OK for them to stoop to discussing social theory, but it’s not OK for a social scientist to ask about how to optimize his or her SQL query.

this was brought up again today during a discussion of Yvonne Rogers recent paper (pdf) at this past Ubicomp. one of the questions I raised was, “does this paper belong at ubicomp?” it’s certainly about ubicomp issues, it’s certainly relevant to the field, and it certainly highlights a trend that others have noted, as well. trouble is, for a technical audience, a reflection/critique paper looks easy. sure, they say, it’s easy to point to all the things that are wrong with the field and make claims about where the field is going, especially when, like in the case of the Rogers paper, there is no implementation to say “we should be doing more stuff like this.” but writing the next generation of location prediction algorithms, now that takes really skill, and if you do it well enough, then you really deserve that conference paper. this is a multifaceted issue that I don’t really have the space to treat here, but it is another indicator of this trend in viewing technical aspects as superior to others.

let’s get over it. I suspect the problem is not that our craft is really all that incomprehensible to those outside our discipline. rather, I think it’s mainly that people in CS tend to have really poor communication skills when it comes to explaining anything technical to non-CS types. if presented in an obfuscating way, structuration theory can be just as confusing as polymorphism (personally, I think Giddens’ explanation of his own theory is rather obfuscating, but that’s just me). I remember going through this with my mother when I was in high school. she would ask what I did that day, and I would have to explain to her multiple inheritance, or infinite series, or Shakespeare’s use of, and deviation from, iambic pentameter. the point being, even given an audience that is not at all technically savvy, one should be able to give at least a somewhat intuitive explanation of what one is doing that will (a) satisfy those with the technical background and (b) at least impart some understand to those without such a technical background. furthermore, I believe that it is one’s own best interest to periodically explain one’s work to those outside of one’s discipline. not only does this force you to be familiar enough with every aspect to explain it thoroughly and comprehensibly, it helps to improve your communication skills with those within your own discipline. while this is a bit of a complaint about people apologizing for code, I have seen far too many talks that consisted of the presenter simply reading through slide after slide of dense math, code, and disciplinary jargon. explaining things to those outside your own discipline gives you a better handle on explaining it to those within your discipline.

I will admit that there are other possibilities. while even the most jargon-laden discussions of critical theory are at least still in English, a blurb of Java really is, to some approximation, in a foreign language. if code is absolutely necessary to get the point at hand across, it would be best not to alienate those who can’t read it, and it would also be good not to belittle those who can. also, both of these events were run under the auspices of computer science organizations. AAAI is about AI research, which usually is done with computers, and the two organizers of the game research workshop both hold appointments in UCI’s Informatics department. as such, it would behoove those present to make visitors from other disciplines feel welcomed, not estranged. I would argue that the best way to do that is to explain to them your craft, not assume it is over their heads, but I understand why there is the focus on code in their situations.

what do you think? am I imagining this air of supposed superiority about computer scientists? do your interdisciplinary collaborations have hints of arrogance from the computing side of things? what do you do when presenting at interdisciplinary gatherings?

don't buy a Chrysler

2007-01-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

I was beyond incredulous after reading the remarks of Chrysler's cheif economist Van Jolissaint that question the severity and immediacy of global warming. according to the BBC, Jolissaint said that "global warming [is] a far-off risk whose magnitude [is] uncertain." what? you must be joking? I just don't get it. even if he thinks climate change isn't a big concert (which is beyond foolish), the buying public certainly thinks it's a big deal, and it would behoove companies to get "greener," if for no other reason than to appeal to consumers.

Jolissaint went so far as to call the European attitude toward global warming "quasi-hysterical" and akin to that of "chicken little." chicken little? you know what, the sky may not be falling, but it sure is getting hotter, and all you have to do is open your eyes to see some of the effects.

interpretation

2007-01-07T16:34:00.000-08:00

we could do some interpretation here. well, a little bit. but let's go down a bit farther, there's a bunch of stuff for interpretation down there.

when it was founded, the city of Irvine set aside land that was to be preserved and never developed. in the interest of keeping the land as pristine as possible, it is not open to the public. this land is referred to as the Irvine Ranch Land Reserve and is managed by the Irvine Ranch Land Reserve Trust. in addition to removing invasive species and other ecological restoration, part of the Trust’s role involves organizing activities where volunteer docents lead hikes, mountain biking, equestrian rides, and other events so that the public can enjoy the land without damaging it. I know, there’s a bit of backward thinking here, but I suspect that the majority of people who live in the OC would not know how to treat nature with respect. it sucks that the minority can’t use the land freely as a result, but this is a debate for another day.

today, I went on a mountain biking ride that the Trust organized. I’m a novice mountain biker still, so I went on the beginning/intermediate ride. during these rides, they occasionally stop to let everyone regroup and make sure no one gets left behind. at one such stop, one of the volunteers leading ride make some comment about “interpretation,” which is paraphrased above. I was rather confused. were they going to be doing an interpretive mountain bike dance? at any rate, once the whole group made it to the next stopping point, one of the guides started talking about the native plant life. he described how the north and south faces of a hill will have different vegetation because of the different amounts of sunlight they receive and pointed out a few examples. my girlfriend, who works for the Trust and was helping lead the ride, pointed out some mustard, an invasive species in the area. some of the other volunteers chimed in with information about the wildlife that lives in that region. altogether, rather informative.

I was still, however, quite confused. was this interpretation? and if it was, why was it so named? hmm, very interesting. let’s unpack this a bit, shall we?

the first thing that struck me, when the guide began his explanation, was that we was going to look at the land and interpret it to determine what geological events had occurred to make it so shaped, e.g., this valley is the result of the massive rains two years ago, or this ridge is the result of ice shelves receding at the end of the last ice age. but, no, it was just informing us about the flora and fauna. my girlfriend later informed me that the Trust organizes “interpretive hikes,” in which docents spend the entire hike interpreting the landscape. my question, then, is why call it interpretive hikes? why not informative? or educational? or instructional? I suspect the answer may be that these docents really see themselves as not just educating the public, but interpreting the landscape for them. I think in this case there may be two relevant senses of interpret.

first, I’m struck by the way that someone can interpret a text, or scene from a play, or a single sentence. for example, the sentence “no fruit flies like a banana” has at least two possible interpretations. in this context, interpreting is analyzing the form, using it to discern underlying meaning, and sharing that meaning with others. with this sense of the word, guides see themselves as finding the meaning behind the landscape and passing it along to participants.

second, when a translator is hired to serve as an intermediary between two people who speak different languages, the person who does the translation is sometimes referred to as an interpreter. in a similar sense, guides may see themselves as the intermediary, translating between the landscape and between the public, between mother nature and her uncomprehending children.

both these cases contain the transmission between two parties via an intermediary of an idea, of some thought, of meaning. in this view, under this conceptual stance, using this metaphor, nature is not the environment in which we live, but is a conscious, competent entity that can readily communicate with us, if only we know how to interpret what it/she says. considering that most of these guides chose to engage in activities like hiking and mountain biking, that these activities take place outside, that the areas where these activities take place are some of the few places in the OC to get away from suburbia, it is unsurprising that the language they use would have such a stance towards nature as a part of its underpinnings.

may be just random word choice, but I think it’s significant. what do you think? is this an arbitrarily chosen term, or might there be some deeper meaning behind it? what other possible senses of “interpretation” could shed light on this word choice?

rights for robots? yeah, right

2006-12-21T10:11:00.000-08:00

so, who thinks that in, say, the next 20 to 50 years, robots will be sufficiently advanced to merit rights and responsibilities as citizens, rights such as voting and "health" care (which in this case I suppose would mean regular maintenance), and responsibilities such as paying taxes and compulsory military service? not me. however, a recent paper (via BBC) assembled by the Horizon Scanning Centre for the UK's Office of Science claims that robots could develop to a point sufficient to merit being treated as citizens within 20 to 50 years. remember the first AI conference 50 years ago when McCarthy coined the term and people thought we'd have machines smarter than people in, oh, maybe 20 years? or maybe 50 years? or maybe more like 100? or, hey, maybe never...?

machines are already far intellectually superior to humans in many regards. machines don't get fatigued (bitrot notwithstanding), machines are (generally) deterministic, machines don't make numerical errors (or errors of any sort) that aren't the result of some human error or mechanical breakdown. a machine can analyze huge textual corpora to extract all sorts of interesting and useful information. machines can perform the thousands and millions of calculations per second necessary to render 3D graphics. machines can navigate through a 3D physical environment, sometimes in the dark. machines can do all sorts of things humans can't do. why is it that we keep trying to make machines do things that humans can do? I know there are arguments about replacing the unskilled labor force and dangerous jobs with robot laborers (e.g., Kapek's R.U.R.), and so on and so forth. however, I doubt there would be a cry from the public to grant robotic laborers rights as citizens. for that, such machines would need to have certain elements of human experience. I don't know what subset of human experience makes one merit citizenship. are any researchers (aside from the vociferous Minsky) working on such goals? not that I'm incredibly well-read in AI at large, but most of the stuff I see in the field is aimed at weak AI, not the type of AI that would merit citizenship.

furthermore, how did this end up in a government report? I understand that the whole goal of this project was to see things that might be coming down the pike in the next 20 to 50 years, and robots with rights is certainly a possibility. I also think it doesn't hurt to consider these things well in advance so that, should the time come to make such a decision, we are not blind-sided. maybe I'm just out of touch, but I mean really, c'mon, you can't be serious. does anyone actually think that (a) significant research is being done in this direction with the goal of making machines that would be publicly considered sentient, and (b) that this research will produce such a machine with the half-century timeline? anyone?

transitioning from a police state to policing the police

2006-12-09T17:34:00.000-08:00

by now, most folks know that the UCLA police tasered a student about a month ago. I particularly liked danah’s remark, “Welcome to a police state.” if you don't know what I’m talking about, just google "ucla taser" and prepare to be appalled. really rather disturbing stuff. however, I saw something in the LA Times recently that might be subtly more disturbing.

civil rights activists have asked that the LAPD install surveillance cameras in their own stations and cruisers, the idea being that knowledge of constant monitoring would discourage further incidents like that above, or the Rodney King violence, or so many others like them that about which we don’t hear, as well as to properly punish those who carry out such acts when they are committed. interestingly, the LAPD seems to be going along with this plan, although so far not as a full and complete camera deployment. at least, not yet.

this proposal highlights in an interesting way the assumption in our culture that the camera creates a veridical representation of reality. actually, the camera can distort just as much as any personal testimony, but in different ways. a camera can show you images and sound, but it cannot directly capture the thoughts, feelings, and motivations, the subjective experience, of those involved in the acts recorded. obviously, one would want to use video footage in conjunction with personal testimony, but there is a possibility to listen more to the tape than to the witness, since it is assumed that the camera is an “objective” viewer, and objectivism is so highly prized in our society.

moreover, though, I find this troubling because of the Foucauldian overtones of panopticonism. except that rather than having the invisible government in the center, constantly monitoring its citizens, we have something more of an omni-opticon (thanks to meta for this term), where in everyone watches everyone else, and behavioral and social control are exercised by the ever-present gaze of the public on itself.

what I want to know is, who is watching the people who watch the police to make sure that they are not hood-winked into ignoring abuse of police power? are the police being watched by other police? if everyone is watching each other, is anyone watching themselves? what are the consequences of a state of omni-opticonism?

mind you, I’m not arguing that we should not take such measures of oversight in matters of the police. the fact that these cameras were so recently installed and an officer was already, on December 8, arrested for assaulting a hand-cuffed 16-year old boy. unchecked power will grow unchecked until it becomes absolute, and we know what that leads to. my question is, what is the right mechanism of oversight? by virtue of the word “oversight,” are we implying the need for some sort of surveillance? in the LA Times article cited above, one councilman stated that “strong leadership” would be even better at controlling corruption, even though the arrest he gave as an example of strong leadership occurred due to the use of the recently installed cameras. it may be that the most effective mechanism in controlling corruption is such surveillance equipment. however, I then have to ask what the broader consequences and implications are of such moves. what happens when people become accustomed to such constant surveillance in almost every aspect of their lives?

who will protect us from our protectors? who will protect us from ourselves?

virtual memories

2006-12-07T22:14:00.000-08:00

ars recently had a post about a study indicating that people are more likely to have false memories about products that they interact with virtual than about products of which they see only static images and text. this is interesting for a few reasons, not the least of which are the implications it might have for virtual worlds like Second Life or World of Warcraft. these experiments (pdf) focused on virtual objects. how much of the tendency for false memories would transfer to social situations? my other question is how these false memories compare to the memories that would be formed from interacting with the physical product itself. is my memory both more inclusive (I get less false negatives) and more discerning (I get less false positives)? what about print media vs tv vs radio vs actual object vs virtual object? what about objects vs events vs social interactions? how about interactions w/ strangers vs interactions w/ friends vs common interactions vs uncommon interactions. I know there's a bunch of psych research on false memories, e.g. Beth Loftus, but it would be really interesting, in light of this recent study, to see how much of it and what sorts transfer to virtual experiences. I think this is a really interesting line or research and there's a heck of a lot to be explored here.

what.are.all.those.dots.for?

2006-12-07T21:46:00.000-08:00

for a moment, ignore the content of this BBC article and scroll down to the second image.

check out the text on the bottom of that sign. "www.playboy.go.to_hell!" I tried, but there's not apparently a site by that name. what does this mean? is there confusion happening about why people are putting dots in their sentences? I could see if this guy doesn't have internet access there could be confusion about why people were putting dots in between words instead of spaces. however, I think this sort of confusion may be slightly more wide spread.

I recently heard about the work of Eszter Hargittai study "average people" (i.e., not in the technology profession) using search tools. apparently, there's not a clear distinction between the understanding of the long rectangular space into which you type your Google queries and the long rectangular space in the browser where you type web addresses. a common pattern was people typing things like "lactose.intolerant.brownie.recipe" into the address bar. it's not that people can't tell the two apart, because they know that spaces in one place are OK but in the other spaces are no good. there's just a disconnect as to the meaning and function, or perhaps it's a matter of mental models. at any rate, the digital divide, she says, is not about access to technology but understanding of how to use it. the sign depicted above, I think, may be a case of this sort of digital divide.

who approved the "kids from hell"?

2006-12-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

I was at the gym this morning, and on the large and annoyingly loud HD TV that I usually try to ignore was a news story, I believe it was on ABC, and badly behaved kids in a restaurant. I know, urgent breaking news, right? apparently, the station had hired two child actors to be obnoxiously loud and annoying children in a restaurant, as well as hiring an actor to play the father who ignored them and talked on his cell phone the whole time. they showed clips from hidden cameras in the restaurant in which the kids were banging on the plates and silverware, singing loudly, chasing around, diving under tables, etc. I think the purpose was to see how far they could go before someone would do something. a number of people tried to talk to the father, who just acted confused. "what do you mean my kids are out of control?" others tried to stop the kids, who either ignored them or got more annoying. when the restaurant manager came out, the kids hid under a table. why this is news is beyond me, but there's something even more troubling here.

through what process did this station have to go to get this segment approved? clearly, there are specific legal processes through which one must go to show a recording of some random person on TV. did they do a "gotcha" thing where they came out and had everyone sign forms? even beyond the legal questions, these people's dinners were almost completely ruined. and for what? for our entertainment on the morning news? if I wanted to do a similar social-behavior experiment, I would have to get it approved by my university's Institutional Review Board (IRB). the IRB would want to know what to see written informed consent from all participants (or an explanation of why written informed consent was neither necessary nor practical), would want assurances that all possible lengths were gone to in order to minimize risk and discomfort to participants, why it was important to gather personally identifiable information (people's faces that link them to the recordings about them), how the recordings would be used, and a justification of why this was an important experiment to carry out. did the news station do any of these things? is there any knowledge to be gained from this? or did they ruin dozens of people's evenings out for the sake of entertaining some early morning viewers?

it sort of reminds me of another discussion I had of why the IRB seems like a slightly flawed enterprise. I need IRB approval any time that I want to collect data about human subjects and disseminate or publish those data or findings derived from them. however, it was suggested, what if I am a theatre critic and I go to a play. I am collecting and disseminating "data" about the performance, which is put on by humans, and the audience, which is composed of humans. if I write something like "the audience seemed to appreciate the director's handling of act 3, scene 2," do I need IRB approval because I have collected and disseminated data about human beings? I really don't understand why this would not fall under the IRBs purview, but something like observing people at the mall (pdf) would.

clearly, IRBs are an important aspect of research, c.f. Stanford prison experiment and Milgram's studies in obedience and authority. however, where do we draw the line, how do we determine what needs IRB oversight and what does not, and when does regulation by an authority like the IRB change from protecting subjects to inhibiting the progress of important research and contributions to knowledge?

trans fats on the go

2006-12-05T12:18:00.000-08:00

new york city recently passed legislation to ban trans fats in all NYC restaurants. this is pretty cool, but, as the BBC article points out, is going to be very difficult to accomplish, especially considering all the McDonald's-esque establishments in the city. overall, it's certainly an improvement. I have to wonder about a few things, though.

first, will other cities, and perhaps even other states, follow this trend? the article mentions that Chicago is already considering such legislation.

second, will lawmakers consider including prepared foods in such future legislation? granted, with prepared foods (by which I mean grocery-store bought foods with an FDA-approved label), one can check the label and be sure the food does not contain any trans fats, in a way that it's not as easy to check the label in a restaurant. I guess it's a question of whether people are capable of taking care of their own health or whether the state should make sure their food doesn't have as much crap in it. granted, I would wager that most people don't know or aren't fully aware of the detrements surrounding trans fats, but I suspect that's a slightly different problem.

third, will such legislation be extended to other similar compounds and chemical found in, or added to, food products? the BBC article notes that trans fats "have no nutritional benefit." the same could be said about virtually any dye or flavoring added to a food product. afaik, most herbs and spices have some nutritional benefit, e.g. ginger is good for digestion, garlic is beneficial to the immune system, chicken is a natural decongestant, and just about any hot-n-spicy food can help clear the sinuses. even increddibly fatty foods like bacon still have some positive nutritional value to them. however, I'm not certain about the nutritional value of "natural" or "artificial" flavors. what about preservatives? I'm pretty sure, like trans fats, they can extend shelf life, but they add no nutritional value. will governmental bodies start banning the use of preservatives in restaurant-prepared food or even pre-packaged store-bought food?

it's an interesting prospect, and it certainly raises questions about big government. on the one end of the spectrum, there's The Jungle, along with its modern corollary, Fast Food Nation. at the other end is, I don't know, something like Soylent Green, but perhaps slightly less cannibalistic? the extremes are pretty clear, it's that funky grey line somewhere in between that's a littel more fuzzy.

so the question is, just how far should the government go in regulating the contents of the food we buy and consume, and at what point does it become the responsibility of the consumer (or customer or end-user or what have you) to be aware of the content of the food, and in general the products, that they consume (or buy or use)?

...to the moon!

2006-12-04T18:30:00.000-08:00

so NASA is apparently going to build a moonbase. yes, a base on the moon. hopefully, this will be a little more successful than the problem-plagued international space station. combined with the winning of the Ansari X Prize two years ago could mean some very interesting collaborations between the government and private sector. also, since this seems to be a NASA operation and not international, it will be interesting to see how things play out.

on the amusing side, it's interesting to note that "the permanent base will be built near one of the two poles," even though "we don't know as much about the polar regions." lovely.

20061205 - Update

it turns out that, according to the LA Times, "Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Russia have extpressed interest in participating" in the moonbase project. why "Europe" is listed next to other countries, I'm not sure, unelss perhaps Europe has a unified, international space program, and each of the other countries has their own.

previews for previews

2006-11-26T22:32:00.000-08:00

remember the "good-ol-days" of walk-in stills at movie theatres? you know, the still picture advertisements that would show on the screen while people were coming into the theatre? you remember when the theatre companies started adding television-like commercials, interviews, and other cruft, such as regal's "The Twenty"? yeah, I didn't like it much either. well I saw something today that takes it one more level. during one of these pre-show segments, I was actually instructed to be sure and arrive to the theatre early next month to catch the segment on some other upcoming movie. it wasn't enough to bombard me with advertisements, they actually had to advertise for their other advertisements.

that's right, folks, we now have trailers for trailers. what are these, meta-ads? meta-previews? meta-trailers? oh my.

rejecting jesus dolls

2006-11-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

Toys for Tots recently rejected a donation of 4000 Jesus dolls that quote Biblical passages, such as "Love your neighbor as yourself," and (somewhat less neutral) "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." the purpose of these dolls is pretty obvious. now, I'm not disagreeing with TfT's refusal to accept the donation, but I find it rather interesting.

I can't think of a single toy, or any artifact, for that matter, that doesn't have values either explicitly or implicitly built into it. taking an example from the defamiliarization work of Bell et al. (2005), as well other folks, look at all the kitchen appliances that have efficiency as a built in priority, as in fact the most important priority. my food processor will slice an onion in 20 seconds, puree garbanzo beans in 45, and mince 3 garlic cloves in under a minute. how long does yours take? what isn't focused on in the design of these appliances is the important familial and social roles that cooking can have in home. the artifacts incorporate certain values, and disregard others.

or, if you want to go with toys, just look at traditional action figures (obviously aimed at boys) and dress-up dolls (obviously aimed at girls). even the action figures and dolls themselves and predominantly male and female, respectively. I'd say there are some pretty strong gender-centered values built into those toys.

similarly, the Jesus dolls focus on certain values, namely Christian ones, and not others, i.e. values from any other religion. TfT's actions are interesting on two grounds. first, it seems to implicitly state that other toys don't carry implicit values, or perhaps that the values they implicitly carry are not ones with which the Marine Reserves (the organization behind TfT) disagree. you don't see them turning away Barbie dolls because of the unrealistic impressions they could give young girls about body image, do you? the second interesting aspect is that, by rejecting the Jesus dolls, the Reserves and TfT are stating that religious values are of an entirely different nature than other values. yes yes, separation of church and state and all that. why is it that I should separate my religion from my government, but not my philosophical or moral values? if a toy somehow posited the existence of objective truth (which it might be argued the Jesus dolls do, in addition to their religious message), or supported a phenomenological approach wherein the child was encouraged to recognize their own construction of the object rather than the object's a priori existence, would these charities be so quick to reject such toys?

furthermore, who's to say that children would, upon hearing the pre-recorded voice of a Jesus doll, accept as irrefutable truth that "no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." perhaps children would just dismiss it as the silly thing the doll says. or perhaps children might question, what is this "kingdom of God?" what does it mean to be "born again?" it might even lead them to an early discovery of, thinking about, and questioning of religious ideas than would have otherwise occurred. but no, our children's fragile minds our world view must be protected, lest they be corrupted by the things with which they come in to contact in daily life. we don't believe that children can actually think, let alone think for themselves. do we?

Bell, G., Blythe, M., and Sengers, P. 2005. Making by making strange: Defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologies. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 12, 2 (Jun. 2005), 149-173. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1067860.1067862

air guitar meets wearable computing

2006-11-14T09:09:00.000-08:00

apparently, not only can you look really silly playing air guitar, you can now sound silly, as well. an Australia research group has made a tricked out air guitar t-shirt that connects your body movements into guitar riffs. this is not to be confused with other uber-lame air guitar shirts that make you look really silly and don't even play music. with this shirt, the movement of one elbow is linked to chords, the other to strumming. technical details are sparse, but those more familiar with wearables may be able to take good guesses. the BBC article linked above (which, I admit, seems to be totally oblivious to nearly all previous work done in wearable computing) lists "practical applications" (ugh) such as feedback for sports players. however, it seems like it could also be great for motion capture, especially for large groups when tracking the little ping pong balls gets more difficult. now the only thing I need to pretend I'm Claudio is a voice that's about two octaves higher.

clichés, RPGs, and design

2006-11-03T17:51:00.000-08:00

for anyone who plays (or like me, used to play) console RPGs, there's a really fun list of console RPG clichés, (via Ars Technica’s FF XII review). most of these are taken from Square and Square-Enix games, predominantly the Final Fantasy series (will there even be a final one?). it’s actually pretty amusing, as many of them are verbally described not as clichés but rather as mathematical theorems: the MacGyver Rule (you can use anything and everything as a weapon, including paintbrushes, dictionaries, and umbrellas), Zelda’s Axiom (if anyone tells you about “five magic crystals” you’ll have to track them all down), and Garrett’s Principle (you are somehow able to steal items from people’s houses right under their noses and it’s totally OK). these some pretty amusing observations to anyone who’s played these sorts of games.

however, I think they offer far more than just amusement potential. finding ways to break from these clichés could offer a unique resource for game design ideas. for example, the Law of Cartographical Equivalence states that “The world map always cleanly fits into a rectangular shape with no land masses that cross an edge.” this has always really bugged me. the beginning of Final Fantasy VII takes place entirely within the city of Midgar. during this portion, you don’t get any sort of over-arching map of the city. instead, you get the cognitive map you make for yourself while exploring the city. you get the sense that the world is full of intricate and complex detail. as soon as you leave the city, you get the standard, rectangular shaped world map. once the entire world fits in a neatly defined box, it doesn’t seem nearly as deep or expansive. according to the aforementioned Ars review, one of the changes in FF XII is doing away with the world map, apparently “something longtime FF fans have lamented.” I say, it’s about time, and the reviewer states that “FF XII has a more interesting, open, vibrant, and large world than FF titles with the overworld map.” breaking the cliché leads to new depth in the game.

another interesting one is the Setzer Rule, or Stop Your Life. in FF VI, Setzer is a gambler and ladies’ man who, when he joins up, apparently gives up his wild life of partying and hangs out on the airship when not in your active party. what if we were to violate this cliché, and allow characters to continue their lives outside the party? perhaps that character has adventures of their own that play into different plot paths. perhaps the character discovers a new item or technique that it may have taken hours of play time to come upon otherwise. perhaps the character decides that the player’s quest is for naught, and the player discovers upon his next visit that the character has become a pacifist hermit. allowing characters to develop independent of the player’s interactions could very well be annoying, but by breaking the cliché of party members just hanging out on the airship, we might create the impression of deeper, more complex, more interesting characters that not only have lives independent of the player, but also that the player’s actions or inactions have a real, tangible effect on the world.

this technique of finding and violating clichés could be quite useful in other types of design. for example, some of my research is in developing character-based interactive installations. I’m not sure if I’ve been involved in the research long enough to pick out what the clichés are, but one might be that characters respond visibly and often meaningfully to the actions of participants. what if the characters responded, but in a manner opposite the apparent intention of the participant? would this lead to curiosity, frustration, boredom, or some other reaction? this is somewhat like questioning one’s assumptions, but I think it’s a little different, because assumptions tend to guide work, whereas clichés are properties that the work (completed or in process) exhibits.

obviously, some clichés are in place for a reason. some, such as the Law of Scientific Gratification (whatever device you need is near completion but needs you to fetch some final piece from a monster-infested dungeon), are used as plot devices, if not the best ones. I’m not saying to try and rid ourselves of clichés. just like assumptions, clichés will always be with us. rather, the point is that making a list of clichés and then asking how we can design not to follow those clichés can be a useful resource for reflection upon, and inspiration for, design. indeed, it may be a strategy for reflective design (pdf).

sportsmanship

2006-11-02T21:33:00.000-08:00

the office where I go for physical therapy has some interesting decor. on many of the walls are old-skool sports paraphernalia accompanied by a complimentary drawing in the style of a colored wood-block print that appears to be from the same era as the equipment itself. for example, one wall has a set of old, leather boxing gloves next to a picture of what appear to be two shirtless proper gentlemen in a rope-encircle ring with a judge and several onlookers outside the ring. on another wall hangs a pair of wooden badminton rackets, accompanied by a picture of proper folk playing badminton on the lawn not very much unlike this one (via Google images). overall, it’s actually very tasteful, if not particularly appropriate since many people there are recovering from surgery or old-age induced injuries unrelated to sports.

the most interesting, however, is a catcher’s mitt and mask that appear to be from the turn of the last century. next to them hangs a picture the purportedly depicts the winning run of the 1880 game of the “New York Giants & Chicagos.” the picture shows a runner sliding into home plate and the catcher reaching down to tag the runner. what I find particularly interesting is the title of the picture: “How is it, umpire?” if such a scene were to unfold in professional sports today, it would likely entail the runner and catcher both telling the umpire how it is, not asking. furthermore, half the runner’s team would be waving their arms as a “safe” call, while half the catcher’s team would be jerking their thumbs in an “out” call. I just thought it interesting to see how the tenor of professional sports has changed in the past 125 years.

Irvine police shoot armed bank robber and innocent bystander

2006-10-30T21:28:00.000-08:00

that's what a recent OC register headline should have read. instead, it said, “Irvine hospital worker accidentally shot by police.” confused by the difference? me, too.

as this article describes, last Friday, a man was reported to have robbed the Wells Fargo Bank at Barranca and Creek at knife-point. at knife-point! as the man tried to flee, police fired on the man and shot him in the hand. however, in the process, the police also shot an X-ray technician working at her desk in a local medical building. this is where I come in.

the building in which this technician works is the building where I currently go for physical therapy. I was in fact in physical therapy on Friday, but I left at approximately 11:15, and it seems that the police chase started around 11:20. in all likelihood, as I was biking by the bank, the suspected robber was inside, carrying out his activities at knife-point. at knife-point!

there are two aspects about this episode that I find most disturbing. first is the way the event is reported in the OC register. I’m not for promoting a culture of fear, but would like to know when an armed bank robbery occurs less than 5 miles from my home. however, looking at the headline, it sounds like there was some accident in the ER or something. the news is that the police shot this woman in the process of chasing down an armed bank robber, an important fact very down-played by the headline.

the second disturbing part is that I had to have one of the assistants at physical therapy today ask me if I was there for the excitement on Friday before I found out about the robbery and shooting. granted, I am less than diligent in following the news, but I don’t live in a cave, either. again, I’m not for promoting a culture of fear by reporting on every robbery and homicide in east LA, but I do want to know when this stuff happens so close to the place that I call home.

oh yeah, and did anyone hear about the shooting in the Park West apartment complex this past winter? some guy was found lying on the side walk after having been shot. the only reason I heard about it is because my girlfriend was living in Park West at the time. and oh yeah, Park West is only about 2 miles from UC Irvine.

ah, the safety of a planned community.

pocket protector for the 21st century

2006-10-29T14:41:00.000-08:00

a lab mate posed an interesting question to me. it used to be that wearing a pocket protector was the epitome of geekiness. however, while that symbol is certainly still a part of the culture, you don’t really see that many people actually wearing pocket protectors in earnest anymore. what, he asked, would be the modern equivalent, the pocket protector for the 21^st century?

I paused for a moment, considered the question, then answered: the plastic cell phone belt clip.

no offense to those of you who may use such equipment, but what other modern worn accessory meant to carry, protect, and make constantly handy devices valuable to a geek screams geekiness more than a cell phone belt clip? suggestions?

professing and processing

2006-10-24T11:32:00.000-07:00

it occurred to me the other day that the words “professor” and “processor” only differ by a single letter. hm…

taking a look at the etymology is even more interesting. professor is one who professes profess. profess is associated with the professing vows as to affirm one’s faith and allegiance before becoming a member of a religious order (Church of Reason, anyone?). the Latin roots (where my linguistic tendencies tell me to look) are fateri, to admit or confess, and pro-, before or forward. so, we get to put forth, or to acknowledge openly, as before others.

now look at the etymology of processor, a person or thing that processes (my emphasis). process (v) is following a routine, systematic procedure, often either as in manufacturing, to produce something, or so as to treat a series of items or individuals in a similar manner (i.e., the army recruiter processes applications/applicants). the Latin roots are cedere, to go, yield, or withdraw, and, again, pro-. so, we get going forward, the act of moving forward, with the connotation of doing so in a systematic way.

look at these two together. the initial reaction might be to consider the way that the professor is a processor of knowledge or information, exploring new conceptual areas via a systematic procedure, potentially even creating new knowledge or information (some notes from a talk about a year ago on the culture of information, and our concept of information as a substance – that feels very Lakoff and Johnson). alternatively, professors are processors of students, whom they treat in a systematic, routine way, moving forward through quarter after quarter, year after year of students.

this is not to say that the actual job of being a professor is (or is only) being a processor. the point is merely to point out some interesting conclusions that one might draw from the etymology. and to spark discussion…