Planet GIntern

Manas Tungare: The 5 Stages of Driving in India

Manas — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:39:21 +0000

(with apologies to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross)

Denial: No way that guy’s gonna cut across in front of me.
Anger: Whaa? WTF? Get out of my frikkin’ way!
Bargaining: Maybe if I let him cut across, I could still retain a modicum of sanity.
Depression: Screw this, it’s never gonna get any better.
Acceptance: Oh well, when in Rome …

Vincent Cheung: 1 Million Downloads of Shape Collage

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:29:00 +0000

Shape Collage has now been downloaded over 1 Million times! Crazy.

When I started playing around with the algorithm which would eventually become Shape Collage, I had no idea that this was going to happen. I thought maybe a few people would use it, but I had no idea that it would be this big.

I'll continue to fly by the seat of my pants, take things as they come, and see where this goes. Hopefully this is just the beginning :)

Ben Maurer: Juxtapositions

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Maurer) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:15:00 +0000

From time to time, reCAPTCHA will give users odd juxtapositions of words. I got quite a kick out of seeing this one:

I think this would make a great show!

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Median household income map done

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:20:01 +0000

I just added the median household income to a demographics map, and my oh my you see so much more at the census tract level than you do at the county level. (I recommend making it a bit more opaque to help you see better.)

The map makes me think of mosquito bites: cities have a white center (low-income), surrounded by an angry red ring (the wealthy suburbs), with white again out in the rural areas:

In this image, full white is a median household income of $30,000 per year (in 1999 dollars), while full red is $150,000. Grey is for areas that the Census Bureau didn’t report a median income for — presumably because too few people lived there. The data is from the 2000 census.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: US State legislators’ affiliations

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:19:37 +0000

I have two more political layers up on my political/demographic map: US state senators and US state representatives (or assemblymembers, as they are called in some states). Alaska and Hawaii didn’t fit nicely on these images, but you can see them on the political/demographic map.

In the pictures below (and on my site), red is Republican; blue is Democratic. (To those outside the US who are used to red meaning liberal, the US does its colours backwards, sorry.) Some districts elect multiple members; in those cases I average the colour, with exact Democratic/GOP balance being white. In cases where there is a vacancy or a third-party affiliation, the colour is also white.

Here are the state senators:

Continental US State Senator Party Affiliation

Below is the party affiliation of the lower chamber members (which are usually called Representatives, but also sometimes Assemblymembers or Delegates). Note that Nebraska doesn’t have a lower chamber.

Continental US State Lower Chamber Members' Party Affiliation

Most of the party affiliation data came from the excellent Project Vote Smart. What they didn’t have, I gleaned from the appropriate state legislature’s page, Wikipedia, or both.

For comparison, the images below show all the districts in the continental US in random colours:

Continental US State Senate Districts

Continental US State Lower Chamber Districts

There are almost 8000 state and federal legislators in the US for a population of 300M people, or about one legislator per 375,000 people. The number of legislators varies wildly by state, however. New Hampshire currently has 424 state and federal legislators representing a population of 1.3M, or one legislator for every 3066 people. California currently has 176 representing a population of 36M, or one legislator for every 204,000 people.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Right-brain vs. left-brain: Sarah Palin

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:19:09 +0000

Sarah Palin is, you might have noticed, a very polarizing politician. Liberals are absolutely flummoxed that anybody could like her. Conservatives can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t like her. I think that Sarah Palin shows up a fundamental difference in values between liberals and conservatives: conservatives value right-brain thinking and liberals don’t.

As I have posted before, Jonathan Haight found that liberals and conservatives place different weights on aspects of morality. Liberals weight fairness much more highly than conservatives, for example, and conservatives weight what Haight calls “purity” much more highly than liberals. “Purity” is IMHO a poor term for it: “gut instinct” is probably a better term. It’s getting the feeling that something is wrong or right. This is a right-brain function.

Our educational system works hard to get people to stop listening to their gut, to process with the logical, procedural, lingual left-brain side. There are good pedagogical reasons for this: the right brain is fundamentally non-lingual, so it is difficult (if not impossible!) to explain right-brain decisions, to examine the decisions for errors in reasoning or assumptions, or to grade right-brain reasoning. The right brain can only communicate its conclusions with feelings, with “gut instincts”.

The right-brain does not communicate its decisions well, but that doesn’t mean that its processing is invalid. There are many things that the right brain can do that the left brain cannot. You cannot derive a great song, deduce that your spouse loves you, or prove that that figure a block away is your cousin Chris. People who make decisions only with the left-brain, only with facts and logic are more vulnerable to errors in the models or starting assumptions. (One might argue that the entire mortgage meltdown came from an over-reliance on left-brain reasoning and paying inadequate attention to the little voices saying, “waitaminute — can this really work?”)

If you value right-brain processing, then the political climate for you must be very frustrating. Liberals don’t even pay lip service to right-brain processing: it is so non-valued that it is a complete blind spot for them. (If Obama was any more left-brain, he’d fall over.) I can imagine that it would also be scary to see your beautiful country in the hands of people who apparently are paying no attention at all to their gut.

Sarah Palin is total right-brain. Here is what she said when asked when Bill O’Rielly asked her if she was smart enough to be president:

I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fact resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I’m not saying that has to be me.

Nothing in her answer has to do with left-brain facts or logic, and in fact she skewers left-brain training (“elite … education” and “a fact resume”). She is also completely unapologetic about being right-brained; instead of being guilty and ashamed of it, she gets angry and frustrated at her critics. This is a high-status behaviour, and people think that high-status people do good things, as I have posted about before.

Meanwhile, liberals look at her left-brain abilities and are appalled. They find fault with her left-brain abilities, as evidenced by what they see as her rhetorical weaknesses: her inability to marshal facts into the type of coherent, rhetorically logical arguments that they favour. They do not value her right-brain rhetorical abilities — her ability to reach people’s “guts” — because they do not value right-brain skills. The conservatives are less bothered by her weakness in left-brain skills because they do not value left-brain skills as much.

The left also remembers G. W. Bush, who was also very right-brain, going on gut and instinct. They think that his instincts were frequently wrong (e.g. Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction) with disastrous consequences. So to some extent, they are punishing Sarah Palin for what they saw as G. W. Bush’s mistakes.

Note: I have been somewhat loose with the terms “liberal” and “conservative” here. While I think there are probably not very many right-brain liberals, there are left-brain conservatives. Andrew Sullivan is clearly a left-brain conservative, and Sarah Palin clearly drives him absolutely nuts.

Manas Tungare: Simplified Twitter Microsyntax for the Haiti Earthquake

Manas — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:37:18 +0000

In this post, I have typeset many more sentences in bold than I usually do, so readers can quickly skim through it.

I applaud the efforts of U. Colorado’s EPIC Group in assisting the victims of the Haiti earthquake in calling for help using Twitter, and to make their tweets discoverable and actionable. I just performed a Twitter search for the terms #haiti -RT -http (includes all Tweets tagged #Haiti, except retweets or links) to inspect some of the tweets that are directly related to happenings on the ground, and they are (as expected) only a minuscule percentage of the total number of tweets about #Haiti. Syntax is thus sorely needed to achieve a decent signal-to-noise ratio to assist relief efforts.

Though, in my opinion, the current version of the tweet syntax seems too formal, too rigid and a tad too complicated for victims or rescuers on the ground. I am a programmer, and even I had trouble mentally parsing a few of the examples provided. We must keep in mind that Haiti is a bi-/tri-lingual country (and neither of them is English), so any syntactic terms used should preferably be semi-obvious to non-native speakers of the language as well as rescuers.

Roles of Microsyntax

Make tweets discoverable: Microsyntax can assist local search-and-rescue efforts and unaffected Twitter users in determining if a tweet is actionable. This task is partly a Signal Detection Task and partly a Data Mining problem. In both situations, microsyntax can prove helpful: all that’s needed is a single tag that emphasizes that a particular tweet is actionable (versus not), e.g. #haiti #rescue (or #haitirescue, to avoid having to type a second # (hash) sign). This will greatly increase the sensitivity parameter d’ of the signal detection task.
Make data mining easier: Once a tweet has been detected to be actionable, its contents must be parsed into a form that local efforts can take action upon. While it’s true that all the other proposed microsyntactic tags make it easier for applications to parse the data, this is at the cost of requiring users to learn new syntax. This seems to me a little too much to expect from victims of a recent calamity of this scale as well as from rescue workers with other higher priorities. Instead, as long as our tools can identify relevant tweets, computers should be able to perform the second task of parsing locations, names, and verbs from tags quite easily.

Also, microsyntactic terms need not always be prefixed with # (hash) signs; they are often difficult to type using cell phone keyboards, and on some handsets, may hamper input methods such as T9. Because of the intervening # signs, Tweets containing the proposed microsyntax decrease typographic readability for someone browsing through tweets.

To summarize, this imposes a heavy cognitive load on victims and search-and-rescue efforts while making parsing easier for machines. However, the task of parsing details from tweets can also easily be performed by large numbers of humans a.k.a. crowdsourcing via volunteer efforts or via tools such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Simpler, Lighter Microsyntax

The following are examples of microsyntax that are more readable, yet also parseable by machines. All situations are based on the ones in the original proposed microsyntax. Most are directly based on the EPIC microsyntax, with a few simplifications.

Rule 1: Always write in the third-person. This takes care of part of the name problem.
Rule 2: Instead of using #loc for locations, use “at”. It’s much more natural and not much more difficult to parse.
Rule 3: Verbs are actionable. Not syntactic verbs, but English (or French or Haitian Creole) verbs. It’s a trivial task to populate a tool with a dictionary to detect all word forms correctly.
Rule 4: Anything that cannot be parsed ends up as the equivalent of the #info tag (see EPIC syntax).
Rule 5: The entire text of the tweet should always be available to a human, so whatever information was incompletely parsed can be understood manually, and optionally added to the parsed version by a human.

The general aim is to require as little syntax knowledge as possible, and to keep as close as possible to the natural way people write tweets.

Examples

TWEET-BEFORE: Sherline Birotte aka Memen. Last seen at 19 Ruelle Riviere College University of Porter a 3 story schol building
TWEET-AFTER: #haiti #ruok #name Sherline Birotte aka Memen. Last seen #loc 19 Ruelle Riviere College University of Porter #info a 3 story schol building
Simplified Microsyntax: #haiti #rescue Looking for Sherline Birotte aka Memen. Last seen at 19 Ruelle Riviere College University of Porter, a 3 story school building

This tells ~~the computer~~ us:
What = Looking for someone.
Who = Sherline Birotte aka Memen (identified fuzzily based on initial capital letters)
Where = 19 Ruelle Riviere College University of Porter (automatically parsed based on “at”)
What else = “a 3 story schol building” (i.e. everything else in the tweet)

TWEET-BEFORE: Mirna Nazaire lives in P-A-P at Bizoton 6#12. Entire neighborhood without food. People are dying.
TWEET-AFTER: #haiti #need #food #name Mirna Nazaire lives in #loc PAP at Bizoton 6 #12 #info neighborhood w/o food. People dying
Simplified Microsyntax: #haiti #rescue Mirna Nazaire at PAP at Bizoton 6#12 needs food. Entire neighborhood without food. People dying.

This tells us:
What = needs food. (automatically detected from the verb in the sentence.)
What do they need = food (automatically detected from the object in the sentence.)
Who = Mirna Nazaire (heuristically determined from initial capital letters.)
Where = PAP at Bizoton 6 #12 (detected from microsyntax “at”)
What else = “neighborhood w/o food. People dying.” (Rest of the tweet, unfiltered.)

TWEET-BEFORE: French hospital is now open and ready to receive the wounded at the french lycee in rue marcadieux bourdon
TWEET-AFTER: #haiti #offering #med #loc french lycee in rue marcadieux bourdon #num 30+ #info French hospital is open and ready 2 receive wounded
Simplified Microsyntax: #haiti #rescue French hospital ready to offer help to 30+ wounded at the french lycee in rue marcadieux bourdon

This tells us:
What: Hospital. Also, something to do with medical efforts. (no need to tag explicitly, we can infer that from ‘hospital’.)
Where: The french lycee in rue marcadieux bourdon. (Automatically parsed from microsyntax “at”.)
How many people: 30+. (It’s already a number, no need to state “#num” explicitly.)

These are just a few suggestions. I will be contacting the PIs (principal investigators) of the EPIC project directly with some of my recommendations, but please continue to follow their syntax until they recommend anything different. The current syntax proposal isn’t perfect, but it is more important to avoid fragmenting the tagspace.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Predictions for 2020

admin — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:10:03 +0000

Oh what the heck, since everybody else is doing it, here are my predictions for 2020:

Essentially all cell phones will have built-in video cameras, GPS, and have voice controls.
At least one country will nationalize music in some way, e.g. paying the music companies a per capita fee for their citizens every year. Some countries will strike copyright laws for music. Most just won’t bother enforcing copyright laws for music.
Improved search + improved geo-location of social media streams will mean that it will be far easier to get information about your micro-neighbourhood. Think Google Trends or Google Flu or Twitter Trends, but for the five mile radius of where you are right now. (And, because of #1, you can get video.)
Know where newspapers are right now, on the brink of death? That’s where TV will be in 2020 — squeezed between on-demand entertainment and crowd-generated news.
The cancer five-year survival rate cure rate will be 90% for most cancers, and 40% for the most difficult ones (bone, brain, pancreas, and liver). Treatment will, unfortunately, still majorly suck for most patients.
Mapping will extend to reconstruction of scenes based on user photos (like what Microsoft demonstrated at TED) in a big way. By 2020, 100% of San Francisco’s publicly accessible spaces (yes, including alleys) will be mapped, and about 35% of interior spaces. People at first will be quite upset that the world can “see into” their living room, but they will end up getting used to it.
Marriage for same-sex couples will be recognized by the U.S. government.
Know where newspapers were five years ago, sort of moseying down the path of death? That’s where universities will be in 2020. They will face pressure as superb educational content will become a commodity. Third-party organizations will jump into the mix to provide tutoring and certification, leaving non-research universities with little to offer aside from post-teen socialization and sports.
30% of the world electricity energy production will be solar in 2020. (It’s going to be one hell of a race between climate change and solar energy production, but I think solar energy will win. All the climate-change deniers will say, “See! Toldja so!”
Data format description languages will overthrow XML. mean that data will get passed around in compact formats instead of in XML. (Yes, the DFDL might be in XML, but the data wouldn’t be.)

Okay, I admit it, #10 might just be wishful thinking.

Update: At the time I wrote this, I had not read up on the Google Nexus One phone, which I now find out has voice commands for just about everything. I guess prediction #1 about voice was under-optimistic!

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Early days of the computer revolution

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 08:19:36 +0000

I was talking to a friend of mine who I’m guessing was born in the late 1970s, and mentioned that I had been using computers since 1968ish and email since 1974. (Yes, really.)

I saw a lightbulb go off over his head. He knew I was in my mid-forties, and knew I was a computer geek, but hadn’t ever really put two and two together. “Oh! You were around for the start of the personal computer revolution? What was that like? That must have been totally *COOL*!!!”

I said, “Not really.”

He was stunned. How could it have possibly not been totally cool and awesome? I could see him struggling with trying to figure out how to express his confusion, how to figure out what question to even ask.

I said, “Look. You are old enough that you were around for the start of the mobile phone revolution, right? That must have been totally *COOL*!!!”

“Oh”, he said. “I get it.”

Mobile phones, when they first started out were kind of cool, I guess, but they weren’t “magic” then: they took real effort and patience. They were wickedly expensive, heavy, had lousy user interfaces, and you had to constantly worry about whether you had enough battery life for the call. The reception was frequently (usually?) poor, so even if you could make a connection, your call frequently got dropped. The signal quality was poor, so you had to TALK LOUDLY to be heard and really concentrate to understand the other person. And they didn’t do much. It took a long time for mobile phones to become “magic”, and they only got better incrementally.

When they first came out, personal computers were kind of cool, I guess, but they weren’t “magic” then: they took real effort and patience. They were wickedly expensive. They crashed frequently enough that you always had to worry about saving your work. They had so little disk space that managing your storage was a constant struggle (and why floppies held on for so very long after the introduction of the hard drive).

When I started my first job out of college (working at a DRAM factory for Intel in 1984), they had only recently put in place two data-entry clerks to input information about the materials (“lots”) as the lots traversed the manufacturing plant. (When did the lot arrive at a processing step? When did it get processed? Who processed it? What were the settings and reading on the machine?) However, to get at that information, engineers like me had to get a signature from higher level of management to authorize a request to MIS (which might get turned down!) for that information.

A few months after I started, they bought three IBM PC XTs and put them in a cramped little room for us engineers to use. I believe the only programs on them were a word processor and a spreadsheet. There was no storage available to us. They had hard drives, but we were not allowed to leave anything on the hard drive; we had to take our work away on floppies. The PCs were not networked, so not only was there no email (and of course no Web), but no way to access the data that was collected out on the manufacturing floor.

If I wanted to make a spreadsheet analyzing e.g. the relationship between measured thickness of the aluminum layer, the measured sputtering voltage, and how long it had been since the raw materials had been replenished, I would go to the factory floor, walk around to find different lots in different stages of processing, copy the information to a piece of paper, take the piece of paper and a floppy disk to the computer room (hoping that there was a free computer), copy the data from the piece of paper into the spreadsheet, print the spreadsheet (maybe making a graph, but that was a little advanced), and copy the data onto my floppy if I wanted to look at it again.

Even though we “had computers”, we had no network, no email, and no wiki. The way I shared information was still:

make a bunch of photocopies and put them in people’s (physical) mailboxes,
make a bunch of photocopies and walk around putting them on people’s desks,
make a bunch of photocopies and pass them out at a meeting where I presented my results, or
make one photocopy, write a routing list on it (a list of names with checkboxes), and put it on the first person’s desk. They would read it, check their name off, and pass it to someone else on the list.

At the next company I worked at (1985-7), I got a PC on my desk because I was implementing the materials tracking system (because I had bitched about how stupid it was not to have one — yeah!!). Our company had a network, but it was expensive and complicated enough that my desktop computer wasn’t on the network, nor were the two machines on the floor. Ethernet used a coax cable and (if I recall correctly) you had to make a physical connection by puncturing the cable just right. The configuration was tricky and not very fault-tolerant: if one computer on the network was misconfigured, it would mess up the entire network AND it was difficult even for a skilled network technician to figure out which computer was misconfigured.

At the next company I worked for (1987), I had a Sun workstation on my desk, and we had a network file servers, but I don’t think we used email, even internally.

At my next company (1988-90), I had a Wyse 50 “glass teletype” on my desktop and full email capability. The Wyse 50 didn’t have any graphics, but that wasn’t a real big deal because no programs I would ever want to use at work had graphics of any sort. My department used email heavily, but there were some departments in the company that did not use email, so there were lots of memos that were still issued on paper. They would go either into my (physical) mailbox, or would be pinned to cubicle corridor walls.

While I had the theoretical ability to send email to the outside world then, almost nobody I knew outside the company had email, and figuring out how to address messages to get to the outside was difficult: you had to specify all the intermediate computers, e.g. sun!ubc!decwrl!decshr!slaney.

It wasn’t until that company imploded in about 1990 and my colleagues scattered to other computer companies that I had anyone outside my company to correspond with. (Fortunately, at about the same time, it got easier to address external email messages.)

It wasn’t until 1991 that I stopped seeing paper memos — a full twenty years after the introduction of the Apple II computer. My husband reports that he also stopped seeing paper memos in about 1991.

I would contend that computers didn’t really start to become “magic” until about 1996 or so, when the World Wide Web had been absorbed by the masses and various Web services were available. Only after about 1996 could you pretty reliably assume that anyone (well, those born after WW2 started, at least) used computers or had an email address.

So when personal computers first came out, they were not totally cool. The idea of personal computers was totally cool. The potential was totally cool. But that potential was unrealized for many many years.

Manas Tungare: ReTweeting: Attribution for Discovery versus Attribution for Creation

Manas — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 18:23:29 +0000

During the past few months, I have found myself consuming more news and articles via recommendations from friends and those I follow on Twitter than via traditional source-based subscription (e.g. subscribing to specific feeds or newspapers). Social media discovery is here, and the best part of reTweeted links is that they have already gone through a round of peer review by peers I trust.

Often, I’m tempted to reTweet that content myself, or post it to Facebook, or share it via Google Reader. A few of these media keep attribution intact (e.g. Google Reader adds the “Shared by” metadata for each person in the chain that shared the content.) Others such as Twitter are restricted by the length of the post, so the “RT @” list quickly gets too long and inevitably gets trimmed along the way.

But there’s no accepted practice for how this list should be trimmed. Should you keep the first Tweeter, even if that person is not the author of the content? (E.g. someone who read an NY Times article and tweeted about it.) Should you keep the last reTweeter, who was your direct link to the content in question? What about multiple Tweeters re-posting links to the same content, so it’s not a tree any more, but a forest of links (imagine a directed graph with edges denoting “shared by X to Y”).

The problem is that by including attribution about the process of discovery, we end up attaching higher value to discovery than creation. When someone reTweets a secondary source of information, attribution for the primary source is often trimmed away. This is especially bad for Creative Commons works that require attribution when re-posted, but is bad in general for any kind of work and for authors of that work.

I have come to the conclusion that although attribution for discovery is important, it’s hard to apply consistently in fixed-character-length media. It’s a completely different story in case of original content generated by the tweeter himself/herself: e.g. one-liners, or authors tweeting links to their (longer) content. Attribution for original content is vastly more meaningful than attribution for promoting someone else’s content (although the value of that act is substantial as well.)

So from now on, I will only attribute original content in my tweets and Facebook updates. My intention is not to discount the value of the source that shared the content with me, but instead to promote the original author of that content wherever possible.

David Anderson: How to write a good changelog

David Anderson — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:01:24 +0000

I've just read through the Python 3.1 changelog, and it has encouraged me to write up something that I've wanted to say for a while, but never quite got round to: dear open source developer, please write good changelogs for your project.

What do I mean by changelogs? Historically, the term has meant something akin to "Our version control system sucks, we need to keep track of logical changes by hand". This leads to a "changelog" that looks something like this:

1999-03-24  Stan Shebs  address@removed

	* configure.host (mips-dec-mach3*): Use mipsm3, not mach3.
	
	Attempt to sort out SCO-related configs.  

	* configure.host (i[3456]86-*-sysv4.2*): Use this instead of
	i[3456]86-*-sysv4.2MP and i[3456]86-*-sysv4.2uw2*.
	(i[3456]86-*-sysv5*): Recognize this.

	* configure.tgt (i[3456]86-*-sco3.2v5*, i[3456]86-*-sco3.2v4*):
	Recognize these.

If you're like any developer not involved with the project, that changelog entry is a complete parse error. You have no idea what the actual change is, whether you should care, whether the change was cosmetic or semantic... A compiler analogy would be that if the version control logs are machine code, this is a barely decorated disassembly.

Humans generally don't want to read a disassembly of version control logs. They want to know what changed at a higher, human level, units of change that can be grokked in terms of new tools available to them, new syntax, new libraries, what they need to change in their data to ensure compatibility...

A good changelog doesn't just disassemble version control logs. It presents an executive summary of a whole slew of changes, in terms that make it clear why I, the end user, should be giving a damn.

Thanks for your attention.

Manas Tungare: HOWTO Use custom DNS redirects to save browser keystrokes

Manas — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:23:09 +0000

Given the recent interest in DNS and its role in the public infrastructure of the Internet, sparked by the release of Google Public DNS, here’s a hack that can help you save keystrokes in the browser while accessing your favorite sites. Instead of typing in “youtube.com” or “twitter.com”, you can just type “y” or “t”. If you’re looking for a map of San Francisco, CA, you can type “map/sf” and jump to the right place in Google Maps.

A bright bold blinking marquee disclaimer before we start: this is advanced territory. If you don’t know what sudo is and why 127.0.0.1 is special, be careful following these instructions because you may unintentionally destroy your ability to do anything at all on the Internet — including looking up instructions for getting unstuck. Also, these instructions only apply to Mac OS X and Linux, or other UNIX variants.

Redirect custom DNS hostnames to frequently-accessed sites

The file /etc/hosts on your machine is consulted by the DNS resolver before making a request to a DNS server. The idea is to add new DNS entries to the hosts file on your machine, pointing short domains such as g and t to 127.0.0.1. Now, whenever you type g or t into your browser, the hostname will be matched from your /etc/hosts file, instead of receiving an NXDOMAIN reply (i.e., this domain does not exist) from an upstream DNS provider. Since this request is received by your own machine, you can then handle it to do whatever you want, including, but not limited to, redirecting the user to the intended destination.

This HOWTO assumes that Apache is installed and running on your system with PHP and mod_rewrite support.

Modify /etc/hosts

Open /etc/hosts in your favorite text editor, and add one line for each shortcut you’d like to set up. Leave everything else unchanged. (You will need to sudo edit this file.)

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 c # for Calendar
127.0.0.1 f # for Facebook
127.0.0.1 g # for Google Search
127.0.0.1 m # for Mail
127.0.0.1 map # for Maps
127.0.0.1 t # for Twitter
127.0.0.1 w # for Wikipedia
127.0.0.1 y # for Yelp
127.0.0.1 yo # for YouTube

255.255.255.255	broadcasthost
::1             localhost
fe80::1%lo0	localhost

You can test that this change worked, by typing in the address (e.g. http://g/ in your browser. Instead of seeing a page that says that your browser “can’t find the server ‘g’”, now you would see a page saying that your server isn’t configured correctly, or welcome to Apache, or whatever you would see if you typed http://localhost/ instead. If that worked, proceed.

Configure Apache to handle requests for unknown domains/URIs

Edit the following lines in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. The following code shows an excerpt with lots of context around the line you need to edit. Locate the relevant section in your file.


#
# This should be changed to whatever you set DocumentRoot to.
#
<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">
    #
    # Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
    # or any combination of:
    #   Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
    #
    # Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
    # doesn't give it to you.
    #
    # The Options directive is both complicated and important.  Please see
    # http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options
    # for more information.
    #
    Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews

    #
    # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
    # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
    #   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
    #
    AllowOverride All # <-- Change this from None to All

    #
    # Controls who can get stuff from this server.
    #
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

</Directory>

Locate your Apache root directory. It’s usually /Library/WebServer/Documents on the Mac or /var/www in Ubuntu. If you’re unsure, check where it is by issuing the following command in a terminal: (assuming you’re running Apache 2.x)

grep “DocumentRoot” /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

In that directory, save the following file. It should be named exactly .htaccess. (That’s htaccess with a period at the beginning, so it’s a hidden file on UNIX.) Save it as /Library/WebServer/Documents/.htaccess on Mac OS X or /var/www/.htaccess on Ubuntu.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule    (.*) /index.php [L]

</IfModule>

The actual redirection script

Here’s the script that I use for redirection, but you can roll out your own, and do anything with each request you receive. (If you do something phenomenally awesome, I’d love to hear about it in your comments.) As you can see, it’s customized to the sites I frequent, including location preferences (e.g. the Yelp shortcut takes me to Yelp San Francisco directly. The search box is preconfigured for SF.)

Save this as /Library/WebServer/Documents/index.php (on Mac OS X) or as /var/www/index.php on Ubuntu.

<?php
  $uri = preg_replace('/^\//', '', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
  switch($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']) {
    case 'c':
      redir('http://calendar.google.com/');
      break;
    case 'f':
      redir('http://facebook.com/');
      break;
    case 'g':
      redir('http://www.google.com/search?q=' . $uri);
      break;
    case 'm':
      redir('http://mail.google.com/');
      break;
    case 'map':
      redir('http://maps.google.com/?q=' . $uri);
      break;
    case 't':
      redir('http://twitter.com/');
      break;
    case 'w':
      if ('' === $uri) {
        redir('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/');
      } else {
        redir('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/' . $uri);
      }
      break;
    case 'y':
      if ('' === $uri) {
        redir('http://yelp.com/sf/');
      } else {
        redir('http://yelp.com/search?ns=1&find_loc=San%20Francisco,%20CA&find_desc=' . $uri);
      }
      break;
    case 'yo':
      if ('' === $uri) {
        redir('http://www.youtube.com/');
      } else {
        redir('http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=' . $uri);
      }
      break;
  }

  function redir($url) {
    header('Location: ' . $url);
  }
?>

That’s it, now type your shortcuts into your browser instead of the longer URLs, and there you are. If you run into trouble, leave a comment and I’ll address it.

The only downside of this approach

Redirecting involves an additional HTTP request to your machine, which introduces additional latency. The request, however, is from your machine to your machine itself, so there’s no network involved. Personally, I feel that the keystrokes saved by the technique would have taken longer to type than the shortcuts I set via this method. But you don’t lose anything if you set this up and don’t use it — just continue to type entire URLs and you will never pay a latency penalty.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Australian maps

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:27:56 +0000

My friend Maciek Chudek and I entered two maps into the Mashup Australia contest: Shades of a Sunburnt People and Stimulating a Sunburnt People. The former shows information about the 2006 Australian Census:

Median age

Redder areas have a higher median age; gold areas are younger. (The red maxes out at 45 years old; any area with a median age of 25 or under is full gold.) Grey areas are ones which had so few people that the Australian Bureau of Statistics withheld the data for privacy reasons.

Our other map shows information about the rail, roads, and community infrastructure component of the Australian economic stimulus package:

Australian stimulus program spending

Blue areas are represented by the Australian Labor Party (which controls Parliament), and reddish areas are controlled by other parties. The darker the colour, the more money has been allocated. Dots represent individual projects. Like the Canadian economic stimulus package, we found a systematic bias favouring areas represented by the governing party.

Since these are so similar to my US census map and the Canadian stimulus map, you might think that this was totally straightforward to do. You might be wrong. We did quite a bit of massaging the data to get it out, and Maciek did a lot of analysis of the stimulus information.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Canadian stimulus infrastructure leaving Québec out

admin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:30:46 +0000

Update: Some of the ridings were assigned to neighbouring ridings due to losing some precision in the input lat/lng. This did not make a big difference in the overall picture, as only 2.7% of the projects were classified incorrectly. I’ve updated this blog posting and the map; we probably won’t update the spreadsheet unless we have strong requests to do so.

There has been a fair amount of press lately on the distribution of Canadian stimulus money, with most of what we’d heard saying that Conservative ridings were getting more than their fair share of stimulus money e.g. The Globe and Mail’s Stimulus Program favours Tory ridings. Conservatives countered that it was important to look at the big picture, and that there were multiple stimulus programs. The National Post’s Liberal, NDP ridings getting more than fair share of infrastructure money: analysis reported that non-conservative ridings were getting more than their fair share of the Knowledge Infrastructure Program grants.

My husband and I kind of looked at each other and said, “We can analyze that data!”, so we did. We saw a bias in Conservative/non-Conservative ridings, but it wasn’t huge. We found that Conservative ridings got 51% of the projects, while only 46% of the ridings are Conservative. NDP ridings got 15% of the projects, despite only having 12% of the ridings, and even liberals got slightly more than “their fair share”, with 27% of the projects and only 25% of the ridings.

So who is getting less? The Bloc Québécois. With 15% of the ridings, the Bloc only got 6% of the projects.

If you look at the breakdown by province, it looks like Ontario is getting way, WAY more than its fair share, with some other provinces — especially Québec — getting less than their fair share.

Province	% of projects	% of population
AB	6.71	11
BC	9.2	13
MB	3.81	3.6
NB	3.05	2.2
NF	3.33	1.5
NS	4.20	1.8
NT	0.55	.13
NU	0.39	.094
ON	53.0	39
PE	1.7	.42
QC	8.2	23
SK	5.26	3.1
YT	0.53	0.1

Dollar values are much harder to estimate because the value of each of the projects is given as a range — “under $100K”, “between $100K and $1M”, etc. We made our best guesses at how to calculate that, and our best estimate gives Québec 12% of the dollars for 23% of the population — better, but still way less than they should be getting.

Now, there might be some errors in the data, as described below. However, we think that this is worth investigation, and soon.

If you would like to look at the data yourself, Jim put together a spreadsheet in Open Office format, a slightly less-powerful spreadsheet in Excel format, and a PDF showing information from the spreadsheet, available on his writeup of the data. I of course made a map of the data.

Caveats:

We are in no way affiliated with the Government of Canda or Statistics Canada. This analysis does not represent government policy.
There are multiple parts to the stimulus package, and this analysis only covers the infrastructure component. Other money in the stimulus plan is going towards improving the financial system (which I think means “bank bailouts”, but I’m not sure), extending unemployment benefits, etc.
I assigned ridings based on the latitudes and longitudes that were given in the Economic Action Plan’s data (which Jim pulled down using their API). We have some doubts about the integrity of those lat/long pairs, especially since two of the stimulus projects have lat/longs that are unquestionably in the United States.
My software truncated the latitude and longitude used to assign ridings down to two digits, which means the points can appear a little bit to the east and/or south of their actual location. In cases where a point is very near a riding border, that could mean that it would be assigned to the neighbouring riding. I expect this would only affect a very few ridings, and would not significantly affect the by-province counts. This made absolutely no difference in the riding assignment. Update: 174 ridings were mis-assigned, but this did not make a huge difference in the aggregate numbers. It meant that Conservative ridings got 51.1% of the projects instead of 52%, and Quebec got 8.2% instead of 8.6%. The message stays the same: there is inequity here.
It might be that some national projects are assigned a lat/lng in Ontario because there wasn’t an obvious locus for the project. However, if that were the case, then I would expect that Ottawa would have the biggest number of projects. In fact, the most projects (144) are in the Vaughn riding in Toronto, represented by MP Hon. Maurizio Bevilacqua (L). The Ottawa Centre riding does have the second-highest, but only 101 projects out of the 6424 projects — not enough to explain why QC has so few projects.

Copyrights:

Information on the stimulus project information came from Canada’s Economic Action Plan
Canadian federal riding geometries came from Elections Canada, which requires this notice: © The federal Electoral Districts Boundaries (Representation Order 2003), Elections Canada. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Elections Canada, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0M6 Canada (2007).
Information on Canadian MPs came from the House of Commons Web site and were produced by the Government of Canada. The right to reproduce for non-commercial use is given here.
Provincial population figures came from Statistics Canada.

Update: I looked at per-capita figures, and that makes things look even more skewed. Five of the top ten ridings in projects per hundred thousand people are in Ontario:

Kenora, ON		132.211
Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON		124.42
Yukon, YT		111.94
Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON		101.90
Ottawa Centre, ON		92.37
Egmont, PEI		91.91
Vaughan, ON		91.44
Nunavut, NU		84.82
Western Arctic, NT		84.41
Labrador, NL		79.65

The top riding in Quebec, by comparison, ranks 82th out of 308 ridings (at 29.9 projects per hundred thousand people).

(Note that ridings have roughly between 25 and 125 thousand people, with the average right around one hundred thousand.)

Manas Tungare: HOWTO Obtain metadata for a book given its ISBN using Amazon Web Services in PHP

Manas — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:46:11 +0000

This is a quick snippet I put together for an academic project. To be able to write this, I had to go through several documentation resources, for what is essentially a single web service method call. I figured it would help if I shared my PHP code.

<?php
/**
 * Query Amazon about a particular book by ISBN and obtain metadata.
 * The author disclaims all copyright and places this in the public domain.
 *
 * Amazon's Terms of Use for this service require you to:
 * - Send no more than 1 request every second
 * - Direct traffic to them in some way. You can use the URL provided in the
 *   resulting metadata to achieve this.
 */
class ISBN {
  function getMetadataFromIsbn($isbn) {
    // Get your own accesskey at http://aws.amazon.com/
    $awsAccessKeyID = 'YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID_HERE';
    $awsSecretKey = 'YOUR_SECRET_KEY_HERE';
    $awsAssociateTag = 'YOUR_ASSOCIATE_TAG_HERE';

    $host = 'ecs.amazonaws.com';
    $path = '/onca/xml';

    $args = array(
      'AssociateTag' => $awsAssociateTag,
      'AWSAccessKeyId' => $awsAccessKeyID,
      'IdType' => 'ISBN',
      'ItemId' => $isbn,
      'Operation' => 'ItemLookup',
      'ResponseGroup' => 'Medium',
      'SearchIndex' => 'Books',
      'Service' => 'AWSECommerceService',
      'Timestamp' => gmdate('Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z'),
      'Version'=> '2009-01-06'
    );

    ksort($args);
    $parts = array();
    foreach(array_keys($args) as $key) {
      $parts[] = $key . "=" . $args[$key];
    }

    // Construct the string to sign
    $stringToSign = "GET\n" . $host . "\n" . $path . "\n" . implode("&", $parts);
    $stringToSign = str_replace('+', '%20', $stringToSign);
    $stringToSign = str_replace(':', '%3A', $stringToSign);
    $stringToSign = str_replace(';', urlencode(';'), $stringToSign);

    // Sign the request
    $signature = hash_hmac("sha256", $stringToSign, $awsSecretKey, TRUE);

    // Base64 encode the signature and make it URL safe
    $signature = base64_encode($signature);
    $signature = str_replace('+', '%2B', $signature);
    $signature = str_replace('=', '%3D', $signature);

    // Construct the URL
    $url = 'http://' . $host . $path . '?' . implode("&", $parts) . "&Signature=" . $signature;
    $rawData = file_get_contents($url);

    $metadata = simplexml_load_string($rawData);
    if (isset($metadata->Items->Request->Errors)) {
      return $metadata->Items->Request->Errors;
    } else {
      return $metadata->Items->Item;
    }
  }
}
?>

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Terribly sorry..

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:24:10 +0000

I’m really sorry, but I moved from http://webfoot.com/blog to blog.webfoot.com, and the users are (hopefully only temporarily) lost. I’ll work on it, but it might be a little while.

Okay, I think users are back up. Let me know.

Manas Tungare: Marathon Fundraising: A Noble Goal or Exploiting your Social Network?

Manas — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:25:08 +0000

I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of organized marathons that request donations from one’s friends in order for runners to participate. Both goals on their own — personal fitness and charitable fundraising — are noble; it’s their marriage that seems unholy to me.

Personal Goals versus Charity:
It’s not like the runner in question is doing anything to directly help the populations in need. Let’s be frank, they’re out there fulfilling a personal fitness goal of running a marathon — which is commendable in its own right. I have tremendous respect for marathon runners’ endurance that lets them sustain 26.2 miles of running. It’s also a great way to meet other people with similar interests instead of running alone. For their part, the charitable organizations also do excellent work to solve the issues they’re committed to. Of course, any such work requires financial support and money must be raised to make their projects successful. Unfortunately, these sponsoring organizations have found a great way to exploit marathon runners’ zeal to fulfill their own fund-raising goals.

Consider these statements:

I’m running a marathon, would you donate to Organization X?

I go to the gym thrice a week, would you donate to Organization X?

Both sound absurd to me for the same reason. If I’m putting in effort towards a personal goal, what does donating have anything to do with it? The case would be different if, say, the person were actively working towards a humanitarian goal with direct benefit to the affected populations, and all they needed was a little financial support.

If they’d said:

I’m working on Project X for the people of Y, our budget was $A but we only have $B, would you donate to fill the gap?

…, I’d gladly have contributed, knowing (1) my friend is actively making a difference, not simply pursuing their personal goals and (2) given that my friend is actively involved in the organization makes me trust it more (the notion of transitive trust.) On the other hand, marathon runners typically have no interaction with the organizations under the banner of which they run, except for training with their assigned trainers and running the marathon. I have not yet met a marathon runner who has also actively participated in the non-marathon activities of the organization that directly benefitted the served populations.

Exploiting Friendships: My chief objection to this arrangement is that it blatantly requires marathoners to exploit their friend connections. Charitable donations should be made with an honorable intent, not because not donating will piss off a friend — which is often what marathon donations end up being. Of course, the sponsoring organizations have hit upon a brilliant idea that fills their coffers, never mind the ethical implications of asking friends to donate because you pledged to fulfill a personal goal.

Here’s an excerpt from the Frequently-Asked Questions web page of one such organization (link intentionally not provided). At least this organization is providing this information upfront; others I surveyed did not have anything on their web site, instead requiring users to submit their personally-identifiable information so they could get in touch with you.

What if I cannot raise the pledge amount?

- Org X has to keep its pledge of raising more than its costs. In order to keep this pledge Org X makes to the community, we will secure your commitment in the form of a credit card. We will only charge it for the difference between the required minimum and the money you’ve raised. [...]

So, in effect, runners are simply trying to recoup their out-of-pocket participation costs by requesting donations from acquaintances. That doesn’t seem very charitable to me.

Overhead: One criterion I have for donating to charitable organizations is their level of overhead: what percentage of each $100 of contributions fails to make it to the served population? Overhead costs (sometimes also measured as Fundraising Efficiency) are genuine, and can never be zero; there will always be paperwork, publicity expenses and the like.

In this light, charitable organizations that spend money on marathons do not seem to me to be using their funds wisely. The counter-argument is that they’re spending on activities that generate more funds for them, so the net gain is positive, which I concede to, begrudgingly. Though, I’d much rather this money be spent on catering to their humanitarian mission than on training urban youth for marathons.

In closing: So that’s my point of view. I’ve had face-to-face discussions on this topic with several marathon runners, and I’ve been criticized as someone who doesn’t support any charitable giving (never mind the charities that I do believe in, and regularly donate to.) I’m sure many of the readers of this blog will disagree, and I welcome you to express your mind in the comments. But let’s be clear about one thing: I respect runners and I respect the work of charities. I just do not approve of the sneaky bundling of both these activities.

Manas Tungare: On-the-fly CSS Compression in PHP

Manas — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:42:04 +0000

Web site optimization experts suggest that webmasters try to minimize the number and size of HTTP requests necessary to serve web pages. Web designers often use multiple CSS files because they are easier to manage, but this requires as many HTTP requests as there are CSS files.

This free script serves all your CSS files as a single HTTP resource, minified (by removing comments and extraneous whitespace), and gzip-compressed. It also requests browsers to cache the CSS content for at least a day before trying to fetch a new version.

The best part is that this does not pre-process the files, so it does not add any steps to your deployment process. It’s licensed free for commercial and non-commercial use, with attribution requested.

Vincent Cheung: Last Day in Beijing

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:06:00 +0000

I'm not ignoring you to be rude, it's because I don't understand you

Snuck into the science museum and there was no one inside except a sleeping security guard. It was cool except that most things were turned off.

Pissed that my camera ran out of battery

Disappointed by the lack of animal cruelty at the Beijing Zoo

Had dinner with "very handsome" and Don

Vincent Cheung: One Day In Beijing

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:14:00 +0000

girls here look at me and then blatantly look down to my feet and back up, am I dressed funny or something?

broke my flip flop and limped around a UNESCO site

gave up on trying to take the subway that hasn't been built yet, even though it's on the maps and ticket machines

pointing is my main form of communication

snuck onto a boat

realized I was lost when I was in a tourist site and no one was around

grabbed a pine cone for some cute girls

hopped onto a bus without a clue where it was going, but lots of people were taking it, so it seemed like a good idea

Manas Tungare: The query: Protocol

Manas — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:28:49 +0000

Update: I implemented this idea at http://queryprotocol.appspot.com. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome!

When trying to explain a concept to others over email, I often find myself linking to a search engine’s result pages for a specific query, instead of a single destination URL. These are non-navigational queries, and there is no single result that I expect to be the most important one. Instead, my intention is to provide the reader a variety of links on the topic such that s/he may draw her own conclusions, or solve their own problem — all they need is a nudge towards the right query term to use. If, over time, better search results are available for the same query, then future readers get the benefit of automatically updated results.

E.g. Q: Where can I find the latest numbers related to the spread of the Swine Flu?
A: Try [H1N1 update].

To do this today, I simply link to my favorite search engine, Google. But that does not seem fair to fans of other search engines: Bing, Yahoo!, Altavista, and others. I would prefer to use a notation that allows the reader to use their choice of search engine to obtain the results. Just as we specify our default browser and default email client, we should be able to pick our default search engine.

We have already solved the first two problems (picking default browsers and email clients) using protocol handlers in the operating system. When I pass around a link to a web page, starting with http://, I do not specify the browser it should open in. Your operating system determines that it’s a link to a hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP) document, and invokes your default browser. Similarly, for emails, the mailto: protocol provides for an application-agnostic way to invoke the user’s default email client to send an email.

It is easy to see how a query: protocol could be implemented similarly. To point you to the search results for a particular term, I would send you the following link: (don’t click on it, it won’t work — at least as of this writing.)

[h1n1 update]

The URL that the above links to is query:h1n1+update. Note there’s no HTTP protocol marker specified. If the OS wanted, it could provide local results as well. This means that the protocol extends seamlessly to Desktop Search as well.

Syntactically, this validates as a URI. Just as the mailto: protocol handler defines standard parameter names, subject, cc, and bcc, similar parameters can be standardized for the query: protocol. These may include corpus restricts (corpus={web, images, desktop, ...}), pagination controls (start=0, num=10), or domain restricts (site=manas.tungare.name).

Implementation is simple: all operating systems and major browsers support external custom protocol handlers. They can be configured as follows:

Protocol Prefix: query
Application Name: /Path/to/Application

The application does not need to be very complicated. It’s a mere stub, which, depending upon the user’s preferred search engine, converts a URI of the form query:h1n1+update to http://google.com/search?q=h1n1+update or http://bing.com/search?q=h1n1+update and opens that link in the user’s default browser.

Eventually, if browsers understand the query: protocol, there is no need for the stub application, and users may be able to share and exchange queries and yet seek results using their favorite search engines.

(The opinions expressed in this blog post are solely my own, and may not reflect the opinions of my employer, Google.)

Manas Tungare: Grad School 101

Manas — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:03:34 +0000

This is a collection of tips compiled for a seminar series at Virginia Tech for Computer Science Grad Students in Fall 2008, compiled by Manas Tungare, with contributions from (in alphabetical order) Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Rhonda Phillips, Pardha Pyla, Naren Ramakrishnan, Bill Schilit, and Andrea Wiggins.

Download Slides

Download PDF

1. Introduction

This document is extremely terse, so you don’t end up spending too much time reading it.

2. Getting Started

2.1. Classes

In your first few semesters of grad school, you will be required to take classes. They provide an opportunity to learn about new areas, and gain some depth in your area of focus. But grad school is not about getting an A in every class. Don’t ignore research in favor of getting good grades.

Be clear about the requirements of your program: you don’t want to discover that you missed taking a required class and have to take it towards the end of your Ph.D.

Quote from a professor (used with permission):

Students need to know what advisors do when writing a letter of recommendation. I get requests to write letters of recommendation, and all I can say is “s/he was in class frequently”. Students need to know this, not just to avoid that awkward moment of asking for a letter of recommendation that might not be the one they want, but also so this might serve as motivation for them to attend class. They can’t be shy. They need to be known by professors. Ask questions. Go to research group meetings. Read their papers, etc.

2.2. Choosing an Advisor

Find an advisor whose research interests closely match yours. This is obvious. What is not obvious is the next part: find an advisor whose work culture and personality match yours. You will be working with this person for the next several years, and if you do not enjoy a great working relationship with your advisor, things might get rough.

How do you find out about an advisor’s personality? Talk to their current students and ask around. You’ll need to read between the lines of such conversations, keeping in mind that because they work with that advisor, (1) they either genuinely love working with him/her or (2) they will not talk ill of him/her for fear of retribution.

Ask around: some advisors graduate students rapidly, while others are seldom around, so their students take longer to graduate. Some advisors will provide for frequent, short interactions (face-to-face, email, etc.); others will require you to have completed a significant amount of work before they agree to meet you in person. Some encourage independent work that is mentored sporadically; others may engage in more frequent collaborations. Hardly any will provide hand-holding-this is grad school.

Faculty members can be roughly classified in two very broad groups: senior versus junior. Junior faculty looking for tenure must publish prolifically, while senior faculty have more experience in the field-both are good qualities that will ultimately help you. Weigh these factors if you ever need to pick between one from each group.

Before entering into a long-term relationship with someone you’re interested in, a good way to figure out if you’re compatible is to … do an “Independent Study” with them. This is a no-commitment research-oriented one-on-one project. It’s OK to double up class projects or follow them up as independent studies – talk to the faculty member involved.

Understand what professors want/need from you: support for the primary area of research they are interested in, and willingness to take that research forward in meaningful ways. Funding for graduate students comes from research grants, and if you help write one, you may get the money that the grant brings in.

Here’s a quote from a faculty member (used with permission):

For example, I often email students things like “Hey, this conference call seems close to your work. What do you think?” A negative work student (which, I might add, I have learned to spot quickly and don’t often want working with me) will often reply “Interesting, do you really think we should publish there?” That is clearly the wrong answer. If I didn’t think we should publish there, then I wouldn’t have forwarded this to the student.

The other extreme student (which is typical of the students that I work with) replies: “Very interesting. I went to their website and looked at a couple of papers from last year. They definitely seem similar to my work. I have taken the liberty of jotting down some notes about possible papers that we could write. Let’s discuss these next time we meet. Thanks for sending it.”

2.3. Mentoring

Your advisor isn’t your only mentor; find a senior student in your program with similar interests (and, if possible, the same advisor) who is willing to give you some sage senior advice and help you avoid a few common pitfalls. Peer mentoring can be truly invaluable. Astronauts and professional athletes aren’t the only role models; find a high-performing person at the next higher rank from you and emulate their behavior.

Quote from a Ph.D. student:

When I was a Master’s student, I tried to adopt the practices of a successful PhD student, and it really paid off. As a PhD student, I try to meet the expectations for junior faculty so I’ll be better prepared for that role.

While a dissertation is a very individual activity, there are patterns that all grad students go through that are similar (that’s why Ph.D. Comics is funny). Cultivate early, a group of peers, including a few more advanced students, that have experienced the ups/downs of doing a Ph.D. This will help you survive the difficult parts and help you celebrate the high points along the way.

3. Research

3.1. Literature Review Basics

Any research project begins with a review of the existing literature in the field (or at least, that’s how it should be.) Be exhaustive while citing sources; do not open yourself up to claims of plagiarism, even if you are honestly pursuing your own research. Look up citations for stuff that seems like it may have been done before. Ask your peers (lab mates, professional colleagues at other institutions) if they are aware of any papers near your area.

Posting specific questions about related work to your social network is a good way to learn about work that might not have been widely cited. Some colleagues might offer you a sneak peak at unpublished work. Respect the confidentiality that is implicit in the sharing of such work.

3.2. Managing Research

Research requires as much management as pure effort. You must be able to manage your time, your resources, your sources, information you collect, information you come across, information you generate, samples of stuff you record from experiment participants, interview transcripts and recordings, videos, log files from computer software, etc. Make sure you store these items safely.

There is software to conduct every kind of research activity: pick the best tool for the job.

Word-processing programs that were once adequate for undergrad-level reports and essays cease to scale up to the demands of academic publishing. Consider LaTeX for academic writing: it is free software available for all major operating system platforms, and will not cause corrupt documents, a common occurrence with proprietary software that reads/writes undocumented binary file formats. The effort required to gain familiarity with LaTeX pays itself back several times over during an academic career.

BibTeX is a tool and file format for managing bibliographies, along with several applications that help manage BibTeX-formatted bibliographies. Keep a single library of bibliographic material starting from Day One. This will save you several hours when collating annotated literature to cite in a paper or article.

3.3. Communication

Do not underestimate the value of communication in research. Not only will you perform research by yourself, but you also will be required to talk about it with your advisor, discuss it to lab-mates, write about it in papers and articles, and present it at conferences.

Get feedback from your colleagues before communicating with a wider audience – many heads are better than one. You will be surprised at what other people will spot in your work that you had somehow managed to overlook. This applies equally to papers, talks, presentations, defenses and everything in between.

4. Conferences

Starting to write early on makes your writing better over time. Make your presence known in your research area: publish interesting stuff, but not for the sake of publishing something. Some call this the `least-publishable unit’ model of publishing and many disagree with it. Submit meaningful, completed works of research to the appropriate conferences and journals.

Be proactive in submitting to conferences: do not wait for your advisor to come across a CFP (`Call for Papers’). Subscribe to announcement lists in your field where a lot of CFPs get posted. Your advisor can help you locate these.

Attend conferences even if you’re not presenting during that particular year. It is important to stay abreast of research in your area. Often you will have to pay your own way to attend a conference in another country; this money is well-spent.

It is said that during conferences, hallways are where the action is, not the session rooms. That is where the networking happens. Meet people from your field: these are the same people whose work you build upon, who will build upon your work, and contribute to the same scholarly community. In addition, some of these may be interviewing you after you’re done, either as faculty search committee members or as industry researchers.

Attend smaller research meetings too: departmental get-togethers and seminars are not a distraction from your regular work, but a part of it. Don’t be left out!

If you’re in your second year or higher, prepare an elevator pitch. Be ready to talk to complete strangers about what you do. Prepare individual spiels for the following sets of audiences: your grandma/grandpa, your friend from high school who is pursuing a degree in fine arts, your friend from undergrad in Computer Science, your lab-mates, people in your research area, and finally, your advisor. These are sorted by increasing levels of awareness of the field and research experience. This means that you can dig into several levels of detail as the need arises (sometimes also known as the pyramid model of communication.)

4.1. Presenting at Conferences

A conference presentation is not a verbatim recitation of your paper. Often, the time available to presenters during a conference session is barely enough to whet the appetite of your audience and entice them to read the entire paper. Do not try to cram every single finding from your paper into the 20-minute talk.

Practice presentations before a crowd of your peers before you go to that big conference. There is no substitute for rehearsing. Do not ever read from your slides. Do not EVER read from your slides. There are numerous tips for how to be a better presenter and public speaker, far too many to include in this document.

4.2. Student Volunteer Opportunities

Check whether conferences of your interest waive registration fees and/or provide additional perks in exchange for volunteer service during the conference. If you feel you are capable, take up service positions and be of assistance to the community at large. Apply to be a Student Volunteer as soon as (or even before) you submit your paper. Often, deadlines for Student Volunteer applications are earlier than paper submission deadlines (though this varies by conference.) If accepted, the conference organizers will pay a significant part of your travel expenses (registration, hotel, etc.)

`SV’-ing also is a great opportunity to meet your peers. These are other students who will one day be your research colleagues, collaborators on grants, paper reviewers, co-authors and life-long friends. Meet them, keep in touch.

But remember that your academics come first; service should not come at the cost of your research output.

5. Internships

Internships offer students a perspective on where their skills might be useful outside of the academic realm. Even if you do not intend to pursue a career in industry, opting instead for an academic career, an internship provides a unique perspective into your own work and how it fits into the research community at large – something that a summer at school would not be able to provide.

Make sure you plan this with your advisor well in advance. Do not spring a surprise on him/her after you receive an offer and rent an apartment. Some advisors may prefer that you not go on an internship, but continue to work on your research so you may graduate earlier. Others encourage their students to pursue internships, while a few others may actively provide you leads for promising internship positions. Most research internships are gained either through your own research reputation, or through your advisor’s professional contacts. Thus, a conversation with your advisor on this topic should be held earlier rather than later.

Researchers from industry often scrutinize their intern candidates at conference presentations and other socio-professional venues. You might even receive a spot offer over a casual conversation with your would-be mentor if they are impressed with your work.

While the internship application process is not as rigorous as that for a full-time position, there are few positions and they’re filled as soon as a candidate with matching skills is found. Apply early. Quote from a Ph.D. student:

Don’t be afraid to pursue opportunities. I was always intimidated when I saw solicitations for fellowship applications, travel funding, student grants, awards, etc, but I learned that it doesn’t hurt to apply, and sometimes you’re more qualified than you think you are.

Some research institutions offer internships that do not involve rigorous research, but instead utilize your prototype-building skills to push their research agenda. If you’re in your early years of the graduate program, these are fine ways to get you the proverbial foot in the door and a deeper insight into that institution’s research program.

While at an internship, do not completely ignore the research you conducted back at school. Advisors will understand that your current time demands must favor your current employer, but a three month hiatus in school research can lead to problems resuming it once you’re back.

6. Networking

Know your community and try and get them to know you.

Solving an important research problem sitting in one’s windowless cubicle is good, but networking with peers at research conferences and other academic venues increases one’s chances of getting a real job.

Most academic networking happens at conferences. Make sure you carry business cards so you can exchange contact info easily if required. Though, quite often, you will end up exchanging cards with your peers – who also just got their cards printed! – you never know when you might meet someone who really would like to get in touch with you. Since most academic positions are filled via word-of-mouth, it’s always good to be easy to contact.

You may be invited to spontaneous group lunches or dinners with newly-made acquaintances, which often lead to excellent conversations to remember for a long time. After all, these are people from your own research field who have all congregated to exchange ideas with one another. (But of course, don’t be pushy or show up uninvited.)

If your advisor, committee members, or senior students are attending, they may introduce you to their acquaintances from other schools/companies.

Many advise removing your social networking profiles, such as Facebook or Twitter profiles. While this advice has some merit if your profile has objectionable content, that is likely not the most common case for this audience. As information grows, one’s social network is a valuable resource to be tapped into for relevant, up-to-date news from your field. Often, such nuggets might be found in your friends’ status updates. After several conferences I’ve been to, attendees have taken the initiative to start online groups to continue the conversation beyond the conference. It is a good idea to participate in these.

There also are networking conferences designed for specific audiences; if you are a woman, consider attending the Grace Hopper Conference. If you belong to a minority group in computer science, consider attending the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. There are likely be others in your own field as well.

7. Preparing for the Real World

7.1. Tenure Track (Academic Positions)

For an academic position, you will be evaluated on your ability to chart your own research agenda, and pursue it to fruition. This includes coming up with hypotheses, conducting experiments and publishing your results. As the first two steps are opaque to an external observer, you are thus judged primarily based on your publication output. Whether you like it or not, it’s a publish-or-perish world.

Always keep an updated copy of your résumé and CV available online. A CV (curriculum vitae) is a complete record of your relevant accomplishments and forms part of your application dossier for academic positions.

If your university supports student involvement in school governance, become involved in governance committees. This may seem like a distraction from your studies, but it is excellent preparation for a faculty position in which you will be expected to contribute in service roles in addition to research and teaching.

Do as a student what faculty do: writing research grant proposals. You may start off by assisting your advisor in writing sections of their grant proposals that are related to your research. It is often possible to turn your dissertation proposal into a grant proposal. Even though students cannot be officially co-PIs (Principal Investigator) of a grant, the experience you will gain even from being a nameless contributor is priceless.

7.2. Industry Track (Research Laboratory Positions)

Industry values slightly different skills in budding researchers than does academia. Industry often runs on much faster timelines than academic research, especially in terms of bringing products from the laboratory to the mainstream. Thus, in addition to fundamental research, an industry researcher plays an important secondary role in “productizing” research ideas. This involves developing prototypes and working with development teams to implement these on a larger scale.

It is a belief among some graduate students that a career in industry limits one’s freedom in what you may work on. While it is true that an individual researcher’s broad research direction may need to align with the company’s strategic vision, there is often wide scope for researchers to define the specific problems they are interested in working on and pursue those with their team. It is often the case in academic (though lamentable) that choice of research direction is dictated by available funding opportunities.

8. Closing Statements

Take care of yourself first. Paper submissions, assignments and pending work can take their toll on your health if you ignore yourself. Make sure you eat well, on time, and maintain the energy that is the foundation of everything else.

Enjoy your time here. You’re doing this because you love it!

9. Resources

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Africa journal part 3: people

ducky — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:36:24 +0000

(See also part 1 and part 2 of my Africa postings.)

It’s sort of cliche to say, “the thing I liked best about county X was the people”. We said that about the people in Quebec City, for example. The people in Botswana, however, take it to a whole different level.

There is a concept in southern Africa whose name in Zulu you might be familiar with: ubuntu, or in Setswana botho. It’s not just an operating system, it’s a philosophy of life, almost a religion. The word encapsulates generosity, warmth, openness, and acceptance, but also an acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of all people.

Botho/ubuntu is highly valued in southern Africa; in North America, not so much. I’m not saying that North Americans think that warmth, generosity, openness, and acceptance are bad things, just that they are not valued as highly as other things — like getting the job done quickly and cheaply.

One concrete manifestation of this is that all transactions start with an inquiry about the other: Hello/hello/how are you/fine, how are you/fine, thank you. While this happens in North America, too, you by and large don’t say it to strangers. In North America, when it is your turn to get served, you just say what you want: “One ticket to District 9, please.” Not so in Botswana: all transactions get the full greeting.

Furthermore, while I can’t prove it, I think the Batswana (people of Botswana) mean it.

Valuing botho leads Batswana to be nice, but also it seems like they feel it is their patriotic duty to make sure that tourists have a good time. Botswana has three basic sources of foreign currency: diamonds, cattle, and tourism. That’s pretty much it, and everybody knows that. Everybody understands that diamonds, cattle, and tourism are what funds their roads, their health system, their universities, etc. Thus it is important to the health of their country that tourists keep coming back.

Botswana is also a very small country: 1.7 million people in a country roughly the size of Texas (which has 24 million people). In addition to connections being important (see botho above), everybody knows everybody. (We stopped at a random fast-food place in Francistown at one point, where our Motswana friend B. had lived for about four years, eight years ago. Of the ten or so people in the restaurant, B. knew three. At the hotel we stayed at in Kasane, B. knew one of the desk clerks.) Even if a Motswana doesn’t work in tourism, somebody they know will work in tourism: their brother / sister-in-law / cousin / cousin’s husband’s nephew, somebody.

Finally, Botswana is a politically stable, relatively prosperous country. Botho doesn’t get sacrificed to sectarian violence, nor to hunger. I didn’t see any beggars in Botswana, and the only street hawker we saw had come over from Zimbabwe. (South Africa and Zimbabwe are not prosperous countries, and we did see street hawkers in both of those countries.) There was zero reason to fear getting beaten for my political beliefs, and I never worried about getting mugged.

I was profoundly affected by how nice the people in Botswana were. It was a little bit jarring to come back to the USA, where I wasn’t really supposed to ask gate clerks how they were, and certainly wasn’t supposed to care. I find myself much more wary in North America, with our high number of beggars.

I think that Canadians value botho a bit more than people in the US. So oddly, I think that going to Africa made me a little bit more Canadian!

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Progress! Including census tracts!

ducky — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 05:54:41 +0000

It might not look like I have done much with my maps in a while, but I have been doing quite a lot behind the scenes.

Census Tracts

I am thrilled to say that I now have demographic data at the census tract level now on my electoral map! Unlike my old demographic maps (e.g. my old racial demographics map), the code is fast enough that I don’t have to cache the overlay images. This means that I can allow people to zoom all the way out if they choose, while before I only let people zoom back to zoom level 5 (so you could only see about 1/4 of the continental US at once).

These speed improvements were not easy, and it’s still not super-fast, but it is acceptable. It takes between 5-30 seconds to show a thematic map for 65,323 census tracts. (If you think that is slow, go to Geocommons, the only other site I’ve found to serve similarly complex maps on-the-fly. They take about 40 seconds to show a thematic map for the 3,143 counties.)

A number of people have suggested that I could make things faster by aggregating the data — show things per-state when way zoomed out, then switch to per-county when closer in, then per-census tract when zoomed in even more. I think that sacrifices too much. Take, for example, these two slices of a demographic map of the percent of the population that is black. The %black by county is on the left, the %black by census tract is on the right. The redder an area is, the higher the percentage of black people is.

Percent of population that is black; by counties on left, by census tracts on the right

You’ll notice that the map on the right makes it much clearer just how segregated black communities are outside of the “black belt” in the South. It’s not just that black folks are a significant percentage of the population in a few Northern counties, they are only significantly present in tiny little parts of Northern counties. That’s visible even at zoom level 4 (which is the zoom level that my electoral map opens on). Aggregating the data to the state level would be even more misleading.

Flexibility

Something else that you wouldn’t notice is that my site is now more buzzword-compliant! When I started, I hard-coded the information layers that I wanted: what the name of the attribute was in the database (e.g. whitePop), what the English-language description was (e.g. “% White”), what colour mapping to use, and what min/max numeric values to use. I now have all that information in an XML file on the server, and my client code calls to the server to get the information for the various layers with AJAX techniques. It is thus really easy for me to insert a new layer into a map or even to create a new map with different layers on it. (For example, I have dithered about making a map that shows only the unemployment rate by county, for each of the past twelve months.)

Some time ago, I also added the ability for me to specify how to calcualte a new number with two different attributes. Before, if I wanted to plot something like %white, I had to add a column to the database of (white population / total population) and map that. Instead, I added the ability to do divisions on-the-fly. Subtracting two attributes was also obviously useful for things like the difference in unemployment from year to year. While I don’t ever add two attributes together yet, I can see that I might want to, like to show the percentage of people who are either Evangelical or Morman. (If you come up with an idea for how multiplying two attributes might be useful, please let me know.)

Loading Data

Something else that isn’t obvious is that I have developed some tools to make it much easier for me to load attribute data. I now use a data definition file to spell out the mapping between fields in an input data file and where the data should go in the database. This makes it much faster for me to add data.

The process still isn’t completely turnkey, alas, because there are a million-six different oddnesses in the data. Here are some of the issues that I’ve faced with data that makes it non-straightforward:

Sometimes the data is ambiguous. For example, there are a number of states that have two jurisdictions with the same name. For example, the census records separately a region that has Bedford City, VA and Bedford County, VA. Both are frequently just named “Bedford” in databases, so I have to go through by hand and figure out which Bedford it is and assign the right code to it. (And sometimes when the code is assigned, it is wrong.)
Electoral results are reported by county everywhere except Alaska, where they are reported by state House district. That meant that I had to copy the county shapes to a US federal electoral districts database, then delete all the Alaskan polygons, load up the state House district polygons, and copy those to the US federal electoral districts database.
I spent some time trying to reverse-engineer the (undocumented) Census Bureau site so that I could automate downloading Census Bureau data. No luck so far. (If you can help, please let me know!) This means that I have to go through an annoyingly manual process to download census tract attributes.
Federal congressional districts have names like “CA-32″ and “IL-7″, and the databases reflect that. I thought I’d just use the state jurisdiction ID (the FIPS code, for mapping geeks) for two digits and two digits for the district ID, so CA-32 would turn into 0632 and IL-7 would turn into 1707. Unfortunately, if a state has a small enough population, they only get one congressional rep; the data file had entries like “AK-At large” which not only messed up my parsing, but raised the question of whether at-large congresspeople should be district 0 or district 1. I scratched my head and decided assign 0 to at-large districts. (So AK-At large became 0200.) Well, I found out later that data files seem to assign at-large districts the number 1, so I had to redo it.

None of these data issues are hard problems, they are just annoying and mean that I have to do some hand-tweaking of the process for almost every new jurisdiction type or attribute. It also takes time just to load the data up to my database server.

I am really excited to get the on-the-fly census tract maps working. I’ve been wanting it for about three years, and working on it off and on (mostly off) for about six months. It really closes a chapter for me.

Now there is one more quickie mapping application that I want to do, and then I plan to dive into adding Canadian information. If you know of good Canadian data that I can use freely, please let me know. (And yes, I already know about GeoGratis.)

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Africa journal part 2: elephants

ducky — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 02:05:34 +0000

Of all the charismatic megafauna in Botswana, elephants are perhaps the most charismatic and definitely the most mega. We are also friends with Jake Wall, an elephant researcher working with Save the Elephants (see the National Geographic article that he’s featured in!), so we probably knew more about elephants than any other of the Botsana animals. Good thing, as we saw lots of elephants. LOTS of elephants. I am certain that I saw at least one hundred, and maybe two or three hundred.

We saw the biggest herds from the Chobe river next to the Chobe National Park, near Kasane.

There are 50,000 elephants in the 11,700km² park, and in the dry season, many of the ones in the north go to the river in the late afternoon to drink. There are so many elephants there that there are practically traffic jams!

Not only that, but the herds do not run away from tourists in boats. I don’t know if they are just habituated to tourists and how much of it is that groups of primate predators in boats aren’t as threatening as groups of primate predators on land. (How do they know we are predators? Predators have eyes that face forwards.) The elephants kept wary eyes on the boats, but they weren’t spooked enough to move away. Later on the safari, we mostly got to watch animals’ backsides as they moved away from the scary tourists; the river cruise was one place where we saw their frontsides.

In the same way, because we were in boats, the elephants weren’t a threat to us. That meant that the boat captains could bring us quite close. I estimate that we got to within four or five meters of elephants (and crocodiles and hippos!) sometimes.

On our second river cruise, a bachelor herd (males only) swam across the river RIGHT IN FRONT OF US. I knew that elephants could swim, but was quite surprised at how they swam. Unlike dogs or horses, their heads are almost completely submerged and their bodies are completely invisible. All you can see is a little bit of trunk, acting as a snorkel, and the tops of their heads. Their heads rock forwards and back as they swim.

Elephant swimming across Chobe river

All fourteen of the bachelor herd got into the water, but one young male turned abruptly back after walking in up to about his shoulders. Our guide surmised that he was new to the area and afraid of the water. As we left, he was wandering back and forth on the shore, looking across the river at his buddies. I imagined him feeling bereft and forelorn, hating being separated from his herd but also afraid of the dark waters in front of him.

His buddies, once they got across, pulled up hunks of the tall grass in the marshy land on the other side and for all the world appeared to spank the ground with it, then eat it. Our captain explained that they were knocking the dirt off of the roots. (They maybe were standing in a little bit of water — hard to tell from a distance when marsh grasses were everywhere.) When an elephant dies of “old age”, it is usually from starvation. Either the teeth wear down to unusable or they fall out, and then the elephant can’t chew its food adequately. If they knock the dirt off, then that saves wear and tear on the teeth.

On the other hand, sometimes elephants would eat dirt. Yes, really. There are some minerals (like salt) that aren’t plentiful enough in their food, so they will dig holes and eat the dirt. (They might not chew the dirt, I suppose, so perhaps that dirt doesn’t wear down their teeth.)

Elephants feeding each other dirt from a hole they dug

The first pictures, of the elephants at the riverbank, are mostly “breeding herds” — composed of females and juvenile males. As soon as a male starts getting overly friendly with the females in the herd, the mother forces him out! I sure hope that elephants have complex language, as otherwise it seems like it would be a horrible, horrible shock. Imagine being a boy who spends every minute of every day with the same twenty family members, and as soon as your mom sees you checking a girl out, she forcibly runs you out without telling you why! Imagine then having to find a group of other lonely males — with presumably a different social structure — and try to fit in.

The bachelor herds we saw had a range of ages hanging out together. We heard that the younger bulls learned how to do things from the older bulls. (Presumably like how to cross rivers, and also where the good water holes are.)

Bulls do not always hang out together; sometimes they go off on their own. Not being an elephant psychologist, I don’t know if they are socially maladept, bored, tired of being around younger bulls, tired of being around older bulls, or what. Maybe those anthropomorphic emotions don’t even make sense for elephants.

We did observe two elephants being affectionate (or at least intimate) with each other, feeding each other dirt from a hole they had dug — see photo above.

It was not uncommon to see lone bulls — occasionally at very close range!

Jim responding to cries that there was an elephant in our camp

We were taking a siesta in our tent when we heard people shouting that there was an elephant in our camp. We weren’t sure if we were safer inside the tent our outside, and eventually chose to get out of the tent, only to discover that the elephant was only five meters away!

This bull was after seed pods from the camelthorn acacia tree in our camp. He put his tusks around the tree, carefully laid his trunk up the tree trunk, and shook the tree, making pods rain down. He hoovered the area of pods and then sauntered off, totally nonchalant and disinterested in us.

Bull elephant harvesting camelthorn acacia seed pods

I was surprised at just how quiet elephants are when they walk. As I mentioned above, the elephant in our camp was 5m away and we never heard him. Not a thing. They are so big that you’d expect the ground to shake as well, sort of like a truck going by, but no, not a thing. When walking, they have three feet on the ground at any one time, and have big poufy feet, so they are incredibly stealthy. Here’s how big their feet are compared to mine:

Tracks of the elephant that went through our camp

Later on the trip, Jim and I heard a great deal of splashing around while we were visiting the camp latrine, which that night only had distance as its privacy guard. The splashing noise went away before we finished up, and on our way back we encountered a (very uncomfortable/embarrassed) guide who wanted to warn us that an elephant had swum across the river and landed right near us, but didn’t really want to intrude upon us in the latrine! Once the elephant got out of the river, we heard nothing, even though the splashing sounded quite near.

Did that frighten us? No. Maybe it should have, but it didn’t. The elephant that passed the latrine could probably smell us (and the latrine), we were not advancing upon it, it would have to go through some bushes to get to us, and elephants are usually not aggressive unless they are in musth (a condition similar to erustrus in females, characterized by extreme randiness, aggression, and a strong and distinctive odor) and we didn’t smell anything funny. We also only heard one animal splashing, which meant that it was unlikely to think we were threatening its child.

We did see adult females protecting a baby elephant quite fiercely a few days before: note that there are four adult females forming a defensive ring around the baby, barely visible (cyan arrow points to its tail). They were also trumpeting and flapping their ears.

Four female adults protecting one baby elephant

While elephants’ walking is nearly silent, the same cannot be said for their crapping. Their dung comes out in volleyball-sized balls, and like horses but unlike dogs (or lions, as we observed later), elephants don’t stop and squat to defecate, but just lift their tails and keep on walking. That means their dung falls from a great height — two or three meters up. Boom! Boom! Boom!

Elephant dung

The shape is such that, well, I will never look at Rolo chocolates the same way again.

On our river cruise, we were quite surprised to see baboons apparently eating elephant dung. Our guide explained that elephants have poor digestive systems. (Elephants pass so much fiber in their dung that people make paper out of it!). Their digestive system is so poor that frequently it lets fruit and nuts escape undigested. Baboons would thus root through the elephant dung in order to find those fruits and/or nuts.

Baboon eating elephant dung

As you can see, I was fascinated by the elephants.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Africa journal part 1: logistics

ducky — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:42:20 +0000

Jim and I, having no kids of our own, borrow nieces and nephews when they turn (about) fourteen. We had a friend from Botswana who encouraged us to visit, and The Niece was up for it, so we went to Africa! This post talks a little about where we went, how we got there, where we stayed, what the accommodations were like, etc. This post will have almost no observation/analysis/personal notes: it probably isn’t that interesting unless you really like Jim and/or I, or you are planning/thinking about a trip to Botswana yourself. (See the next postings for analysis and personal notes.)

We spent twenty-four days total away from our home, although we spent about seven days getting there and back: one day from Vancouver to Seattle (via Bellingham to pick up The Niece), one night to Frankfurt, one day in Frankfurt, one night to Johannesburg, one day drive to Botswana, and then the reverse (except we flew to Jo’burg instead of driving).

The Safari

The centerpiece of the trip was a seven-night/eight day overland (i.e. driving) safari with Chobezi, camping for one or two nights in one place, then driving to the next interesting place. We travelled in a group of eight: us three, two Belgian men in their early twenties, one guide/driver, and one cook.

We found and booked the trip online (and when I say “we”, I mean “Jim”), with what turned out to be a South African booking agency. This meant that we knew very little about what the safari would be like. We knew where we would be stopping, and we knew that we were going overland and camping in tents with foam matresses, but that was all we knew. We knew so little that we even had trouble rendezvousing with Chobezi at the pickup point!

We camped at four places: at Serondela and Savute Marshe in the Chobe National Park, Moremi Game Reserve, and an island in the Okavongo Delta.

A typical “moving” day would have us get up around 0630h, eat breakfast, pack our gear, tents, and sleeping rolls, wait for the guide and cook to pack everything else (they turned down help), and drive to the next site, looking for game along the way. We’d set up our tents and bedrolls, then take a siesta, sunbathe, hang out, whatever, until about 1630h, when we’d do an evening game drive before dinner. A non-”moving” day would be the same except that we’d go for a game drive early in the morning and not tear down/set up camp or drive to the next site.

We rode around in a “safari car” or “safari truck” — a converted Land Cruiser with elevated bench seats. The truck we used on our safari has five seats plus some storage in the back, plus it hauled a trailer full of stuff when we moved camp. I believe most safaris rely more heavily on airplanes to get people from one place to another; I don’t recall seeing another safari car with storage.

Our safari car

Here are some other safari cars:

Some other companies' safari trucks

The tents were quite big. The Niece and I could stand up in them.

Ducky Standing up in tent

I had never seen bedrolls these before: they were relatively thick foam matresses, with sheets, pillow, and a comforter placed on them, that we could zip up and roll up.

Bedrolls unfurlled (L) and in bondage (R)

Bedrolls rolled up

The tents and bedrolls were heavy, but because we were car camping, it didn’t matter.

Camp hygiene

The camp had a it latrine with a toilet seat frame over it, and canvas walls set up around it. Jim once commented that in terms of value per ounce, the toilet seat was way, way up there!

Next to our tents they put little canvas bags that served as wash basins. Every morning, they would put hot water in the basins for us to wash with. That was really nice!

We also didn’t realize it until near the end, but we had a shower available as well. Apparently the first day, our guide asked me if I wanted a shower. “Maybe later”, I said, and he waited for me but I never got around to asking. I don’t remember this: probably I thought he was kidding. (A shower? While camping?)

At our second stop (at Savute Marsh), we stayed in a campground, with hot showers and sinks and flush toilets and everything. They also had neat washbasins with built-in washboards, so clearly you were allowed (encouraged?) to wash your laundry in the sink.

There were probably twenty campsites at the Savute Marsh campground, filled mostly with self-driving South Africans. You would think that would impede the wildlife viewing, but in fact did not, as you will read about in my elephants post.

Camp food/cooking

Cooking was done on an open fire. They brought along something that looked like an iron coffee table, and put that over the fire.

Kitchen facilities

Breakfast consisted of cold cereal, tea, porridge (oatmeal), and fruit. On moving days, lunch was usually sandwiches (cold cuts), potato salad, and fruit. Dinner was always a hot meal, with a meat course, starch (potatos, rice, or “pap” — sort of corn/maize porridge), and a vegetable dish (e.g. carrots and potatos). The food was really, really yummy — the cook did a great job.

Jim and I normally try to eat vegetarian, with Jim being better at sticking to his values than I. I wimped out and ate the meat in Botswana because it was just easier. (Jim had told the South African booking company that we were vegetarians, but that piece of information never got to the guides.) Jim just didn’t eat the meat for a few days. The cook and guide noticed, and asked Jim, who said that he preferred to not eat meat.

The next day, the cook announced that “for the man who does not eat meat, I fixed something special.” With a flourish, he revealed… chicken! (In many languages, “meat” means “mammal meat”.) Faced with that level of attentiveness and care to his needs, Jim (sigh) ate the chicken.

Mokoro camp

For our last two days, we said goodbye to our driver (although we kept our cook) and went out to an island in the Okavango Delta by boat(s). First we took a speedboat to the Boro village, where we transferred to mokoros — poled dugout canoes — for a two-hour water voyage to our camp.

Getting ferried by what are essentially African gondolas sounds very romantic. The reality was less so. The boats were very tippy, so you had to be careful about shifting around. The seats were basically institutional plastic chairs with no legs, just dropped into the boat, so weren’t that comfortable. We went there in the afternoon and came back in the morning — and the camp was west, so we had the sun in our eyes both times. Perhaps because it has been an extremely wet year, there were thousands of gnats, which hovered right at sitting-person-level. To catch the gnats, many water spiders built webs right at sitting-person-level. (Note: neither the gnats nor the spiders bit. They were just annoying.)

Gnats during Mokoro ride

One of the Belgian youths turned his seat around so that the back of his head caught the gnats and spiders, and the sun was not in his eyes. That would have been much more pleasant. Going out in the morning and back in the afternoon would have also been more pleasant.

We went on a game walk on the island, something that we couldn’t do elsewhere. In other areas, we had been pretty much stapled to the truck because of the small but real danger from lions. While we did get a safety lecture before our walk on what to do if we encountered lions, hippos, snakes, or wildebeests, I presume that the dangerous animals are rare on that island. (We did not see any lions, hippos, or snakes, and the wildebeest were a long way away.)

It was nice to get some exercise, and we saw larger herds of animals than we did from the safari truck. (The truck is noisy. It can’t really sneak up on a herd the way we could on foot.) However, we couldn’t get as close on foot, in part because of the need to be stealthy, in part for safety reasons. While we saw lions from several meters (and in one case, ONE meter, see below) from the truck, on the walk we were usually more like 500m or 100m from herbivores.

One example of how close we got in the truck

We also didn’t see much on the walk that we hadn’t already seen from the truck, aside from an aardvark den (a hole in the sand).

The locals who guided or poled us to the island did sing and dance for us on the second night, and we got a mini-tour of their village, and that part was nice. Aside from that, however, I could have done without the Okavongo Delta part of the tour.

Non-safari

We spent several days in Gaborone (”Gabs”), the capital. We ran out to tour the diamond mine in Jwaneng the day after we landed (since the mine only gives tours on Fridays). The mine could have been any heavy equipment plant in North America, except that the second language was Setswana and not Spanish (US) or French (Canada) and there were two more baboons than I would have expected in North America.

Ducky looking out over open-pit diamond mine

We spent the weekend wandering around Gaborone — checking email, letting Katie run on a treadmill at a gym, shopping for things the airlines ban, buying local GSM chips for our cell phones, trying and failing to find local maps, wandering around shopping malls and bazaars — and waiting for our friend B. We were supposed to leave Gabs on Sunday, but our friend B. sadly had to go to a funeral on Sunday, so we had an extra day in Gabs.

We were going to go to the Khama Rhino Sanctuary in Serowe, but because of the funeral, we had to cut something, so we cut the rhinos. We found out later that our friend B. is from Serowe; had we realized that, we would have cut something else.

Serowe is also the hometown of Sir Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana. Botswana is, unlike its neighbours, a bastion of peace and (relative) prosperity, in large part due to this one amazing man. Please pause now and read his Wikipedia entry before going on to my next Africa journal blog posting.

Vincent Cheung: Happy Birthday Tiki!

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:37:00 +0000

It was Tiki's 2nd birthday yesterday! I made this video of her from the many clips that I've taken of her...

Included in the video is Tiki playing fetch with a ball, jumping super high, running up a door, falling off a table, playing with toy mice, spiking a ball, drinking out of a glass, fighting with other cats (and me), drinking out of a glass, and being dressed up in different costumes.

Ben Maurer: Recipe: Double Chocolate Chip Peppermint Cookies

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Maurer) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:43:00 +0000

This cookie is a nice variation on the classic double chocolate chip.

1/2 cup butter (one stick)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg
1/4 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp peppermint
1 cup flower
1/4 cpu unsweatened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

Directions

Preheat oven to 350F
Melt butter and mix with eggs, sugar, peppermint and vanilla
Mix flower, salt, baking soda, and cocoa in a separate bowl
Beat in the dry ingredients
Form balls on a cookie tray and bake for 8-10 minutes. Underbake slightly so the cookies are chewy

Tip: I've found that I'll eat these cookies far quicker than I really should. In order to ration the cookies, I will mix up a double batch, and freeze the balls of dough. Once the dough is frozen, you can place the balls in a ziplock bag. The cookies can be baked from frozen by adding 2 minutes to the baking time and last a few weeks. Cookies can then be baked in small batches. I can't tell any difference between cookies from frozen dough or fresh dough.

David Anderson: Wtf, seriously

David Anderson — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:42:59 +0000

Ever get cold-called on your phone by a Ghanan 419 scammer? I just did.

What the fuck. Seriously.

Vincent Cheung: Summer Travel Plans

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:34:00 +0000

June: Hawaii
July: Winnipeg
August: China
September: LA

Leaving tomorrow for Hawaii. Hopefully my gps device works this time...

David Anderson: Don't panic

David Anderson — Mon, 25 May 2009 03:08:20 +0000

It's Towel Day. Know where your towel is, and remember Douglas.

Heading out to California for a week or so. My towel is in my travel bag. Where is yours?

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Gender and programming

admin — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:44:43 +0000

I had a very brief but very interesting talk with Prof. Margaret Burnett. She does research on gender and programming. at Oregon State University, but was in town for the International Conference on Software Engineering. She said that many studies have shown that women are — in general — more risk averse than men are. (I’ve also commented on this.) She said that her research found that risk-averse people (most women and some men) are less likely to tinker, to explore, to try out novel features in both tools and languages when programming.

I extrapolate that this means that risk-seeking people (most men and some women) were more likely to have better command of tools, and this ties into something that I’ve been voicing frustration with for some time — there is no instruction on how to use tools in the CS curriculum — but I had never seen it as a gender-bias issue before. I can see how a male universe would think there was no need to explain how to use tools because the figured that the guys would just figure it out on their own. And the most guys might — but most of the women and some of the men might not figure out how to use tools on their own.

In particular, there is no instruction on how to use the debugger: not on what features are available, not on when you should use a debugger vs. not, and none on good debugging strategy. (I’ve commented on that here.) Some of using the debugger is art, true, but there are teachable strategies – practically algorithms — for how to use the debugger to achieve specific ends. (For example, I wrote up how to use the debugger to localize the causes of hangs.)

Full of excitement from Prof. Burnett’s revelations, I went to dinner with a bunch of people connected to the research lab I did my MS research in. All men, of course. I related how Prof. Burnett said that women didn’t tinker, and how this obviously implied to me that CS departments should give some instruction on how to use tools. The guys had a different response: “The departments should teach the women how to tinker.”

That was an unsatisfying response to me, but it took me a while to figure out why. It suggests that the risk-averse pool doesn’t know how to tinker, while in my risk-averse model, it is not appropriate to tinker: one shouldn’t goof off fiddling with stuff that has a risk of not being useful when there is work to do!

(It has been emotionally very difficult for me to write this blog post today. I think it is important and worthwhile, but I have a little risk-averse agent in my head screaming, screaming at me that I shouldn’t be wasting my time on this: I should be applying for jobs, looking for an immigration lawyer, doing laundry, or working on improving the performance of my maps code. In other words, writing this post is risky behaviour: it takes time for no immediate payoff, and only a low chance of a future payoff. It might also be controversial enough that it upsets people. Doing laundry, however, is a low-risk behaviour: I am guaranteed that it will make my life fractionally better.)

To change the risk-averse population’s behaviour, you would have to change their entire model of risk-reward. I’m not sure that’s possible, but I also think that you shouldn’t want to change the attitude. You want some people to be risk-seeking, as they are the ones who will get you the big wins. However, they will also get you the big losses. The risk-averse people are the ones who provide stability.

Also note that because there is such asymmetry in task completion time between above-median and below-median, you might expect that a bunch of median programmers are, in the aggregate, more productive than a group at both extremes. (There are limits to how much faster you can get at completing a task, but there are no limits to how much slower you can get.) It might be that risk aversion is a good thing!

There was a study I heard of second-hand (I wish I had a citation — anybody know?) that found that startups with a lot of women (I’m remembering 40%) had much MUCH higher survival rates than ones with lower proportions of women. This makes perfect sense to me; a risk-averse population would rein in the potentially destructive tendencies of a risk-seeking population.

Thus I think it does make sense to provide academic training in how to use tools. This should perhaps be coupled with some propaganda about how it is important to set aside some time in the future to get comfortable with tools. (Perhaps it should be presented as risky to not spend time tinkering with tools!)

UPDATE: There’s an interesting (though all-too-brief!) article that mentions differences in the biochemical responses to risk that men and women produce. It says that men produce adrenaline, which fun. Women produce acetylcholine, which the article says pretty much makes them want to vomit. That could certainly change one’s reaction to risk..

Vincent Cheung: Quotes

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Wed, 13 May 2009 03:11:00 +0000

I keep a list of some of my favourite quotes on Google Documents and I add to it as I come across them. I quite enjoy reading through these quotes periodically and here are some of my favourites:

I won't pretend fun things aren't still fun out of fear of looking silly
-- xkcd 219

It's easy to regret your awkward conversations but hard to regret the ones you didn't have.
-- xkcd 235

We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms
Pound for pound, one of the best verticals
-- xkcd 137

Grad students aren't bad people, they just make terrible life choices
-- Bart Simpson

I think for the most part, if you're really honest with yourself about what you want out of life, life gives it to you.
-- Ted Mosby, How I Met Your Mother

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original
-- Sir Ken Robinson

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
-- Leonardo da Vinci

When you're with someone you love, the most mundane things suddenly become wonderful
-- Hidden Leaves by V.C. Andrews

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
-- Polonius, Hamlet

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
-- Hamlet

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
-- Arthur C. Clarke

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

Penny: "I'm a sagitarious, which probably tells you way more than you need to know."
Sheldon: "Yes, it tells us that you participate in the mass culture delusion that the sun's apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality."
-- Big Bang Theory

Penny: "What time is it?"
Leonard: "Almost 6:30"
Penny: "I slept all day?"
Leonard: "Oh no, it's 6:30 in the morning"
Penny: "What the hell is your problem?"
-- Big Bang Theory

There's always the possibility that alcohol and poor judgment on her part might lead to a nice romantic evening.
-- Sheldon, Big Bang Theory

100% of the shots you don't take don't go in
-- Wayne Gretzky

Animals are such agreeable friends. They ask no questions and they pass no criticism.
--1857 British novelist George Eliot

I screwed up
-- Barack Obama

The truth is told by whoever is left standing.
-- Tom Zarek, Battlestar Galactica

I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing.
-- Warren Buffett

Computer nerds are the sex symbols for the 21st century
-- CBC, Starcraft Documentary

Thinking that other people might be better than you is what makes you Canadian
-- Steven Colbert

Man and woman are born to love, marry and beget children. Woman is so physically constituted that she is the one who bears the child. Man, on the other hand, is given the duty of being the protector of his wife and, after they are born, of his children. Therefore, he must always be the one who takes the initiative. He must be strong, he must be willing, he must be physically able to take care of his charges, He must be the aggressor.

It is, therefore, necessary that the man be taller than the woman. The psychological reason for this is that he must always give the impression of being his woman's superior, both mentally and especially physically. The physical reason, with which we are more concerned, is that if he is taller that his woman, he is better able to kiss her. He must be able to sweep her into his strong arms, and tower over her, and look down into her eyes, and cup her chin in his fingers and then, bend over her face and plant his eager, virile lips on her moist, slightly parted, inviting ones. All of this he must do with the vigor of an assertive male. And, all of these are impossible where, the woman is the taller of the two. For when the situation is reversed, the kiss becomes only a ludicrous banality. The physical mastery is gone, the male prerogative is gone, everything is gone but the fact that two lips are touching two other lips. Nothing can be more disappointing.
-- Hugh Morris, The Art of Kissing (1936)

Ted: "What you and Tony have, what I thought for a second, you and I had, what I know that Marshall and Lily have, I want that. I do. I kept waiting for it to happen and waiting for it to happen and... I guess I'm just tired of waiting."

Stella: "I know that you're tired of waiting, and you may have to wait a little while more, but she's on the way Ted, and she's getting here as fast as she can."
-- How I Met Your Mother

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Arkansas liberalism?

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 02:38:01 +0000

I added a state legislatures partisanship layer to my election map, and also modified a metric which shows kind of how liberal an area is. For every governor, US senator, or US congressman in a district that is a Democrat, I added one. For every legislator who is a Republican, I subtracted one. Now, with the new data, I also add one point for each state legislative chamber that is controlled by Democrats, and subtract one for each that is controlled by Republicans.

This gives me a range of -6 to plus 6 (governor, two US senators, one US congressman, one state senate, one state lower chamber), which I can show in shades of red to blue:

Some things are not surprising: the northeast is very blue; Idaho and Utah are very red. However, I don’t get Arkansas. I wouldn’t have thought that it would be culturally very different from its neighbours, yet most of the state has the maximum value of +6.

Is this all due to Clinton? Did he build a really strong Democratic Party operation in Arkansas? Or did he throw a bunch of money towards Arkansas, for which they are still grateful?

Can anyone familiar with Arkansas shed any light on this?

UPDATE:

A reader from Arkansas explained that the Arkansas Democratic party is very entrenched and strong, but that the populace is not particularly liberal. Essentially, people who are Democrats in Arkansas would be Republicans just about anywhere else. (This is similar to the Liberal Party in BC, which is the most conservative of the three viable parties in BC. The Liberal Party in BC is much more conservative than the Canadian federal Liberal party.)

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Harvard, creativity, and university reform

admin — Sat, 09 May 2009 08:59:51 +0000

Jerome Dolittle recently reported via James Fallows that he had asked thirty Harvard first-year students to redesign universities from the ground up; 29 of 30 came up with, as the author put it, “something that looked very much like Harvard, except a little farther out of town”. He seemed to take this as evidence that Harvard students were not very creative.

This was in response to an article by Randy Pollack talking about how uncreative Chinese MBA students were: when asked to come up with a the most original idea they could for a business, e.g. a restaurant chain, five of six groups came up with the idea of — a restaurant chain! This was given as evidence of how the Chinese educational system did not foster creativity.

Dolittle seemed to think that the Harvard students were just as uncreative as the Chinese students, but I don’t think that comparison is fair. I think that reforming education is a much more difficult problem for first-year students than thinking of a business would be for MBA students.

In addition to the age difference and the difference in academic focus, the MBAs had probably encountered hundreds if not thousands of businesses and products in their day-to-day life. I would bet that the majority of the Harvard freshman had intimate knowledge of exactly one university. It’s difficult to consider how you can change something if you don’t have an idea of the number of degrees of freedom you have.

Even faculty have difficulty being creative about reforming universities. Recently there was a New York Times opinion piece End the University as we know it that got quite a bit of buzz in my circles, despite its recommendations being, in my opinion, not very creative:

Restructure the curriculum to be more interdisciplinary.
Abolish permanent departments, replacing them with problem-focused temporary departments (e.g. Water).
Collaborate more across institutions.
Allow dissertations in forms other than things that look like scholarly books.
Give graduate students real-world skills.
Abolish tenure.

Three recommendations (#1,# 3, and #5) are goals that institutions already aspire to. They might not do it well, but they sure talk about it a lot.

I think people haven’t done #6 because it would lead to either a rise in cost or a decline in quality (or both), not because it wasn’t an obvious thing to try.

Aside from the increased administrative overhead and lack of departmental reputations that #2 would cause, project-based learning has been tried before to some extent. (Hampshire College is highly individual-project based; Colorado College students take one compressed course at a time.) One could also easily argue that each graduate student is supposed to create their “department of one”. (When I got my first MS, I took classes in library science and intellectual property law because that’s what made sense for my area of interest.)

For #4, I believe that it already is possible to do a non-book thesis, particularly in the performing arts. One friend’s “dissertation” was a symphony. Another friend made a movie for her anthropology thesis. While I have a copy of my thesis printed on dead trees, the important version of the thesis is the PDF available on-line.

Even though Taylor’s ideas are not that novel, they got buzz. I think that means that it is really hard for most people to come up with ideas on how to reform university education.

In contrast to the inexperience of the Harvard freshmen, I have been downright promiscuous with universities. (I have eight transcripts now, for examplet.) This familiarity helped me identify — fourteen years ago — some core functions of a university institution that I thought could be disaggregated: unidirectional information transfer, interactive learning experiences, caring/paying attention, and certification. I also showed how these pieces could be rearranged by private enterprise and social media. (In later blog posts, I showed how this disaggregation/disintermediation is already happening.)

Now, it is possible that it is a coincidence that I have both unusual intimacy with universities and was able to come up with creative insights about reform. I suppose it’s also possible that I’m just amazingly brilliant. I don’t think so. I think that if you see lots of X, then it becomes easier to think creatively about things you could do with X.

It might be that the Harvard students were in fact just as uncreative as the Chinese MBAs. However, I don’t think Dolittle proved that.

Vincent Cheung: Phone calls from Internet companies

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:40:00 +0000

Bizarre.

I just got a phone call from godaddy.com. It was a courtesy call just to welcome me to godaddy and to see if everything was ok and if I had any questions. I joined within the past week and transferred one of my domain names to them.

I don't expect phone calls from Internet companies unless something is really wrong, so I was really shocked when they called. I bet their call centre gets a lot of deer in the headlight responses. I suppose they are making an effort to show that they have good service, but from a domain name registrar, it's kinda weird...

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Locally omniscient debugging

admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 00:22:58 +0000

Update: it turns out that lots of people have done exactly what I asked for: see Instruction-level Tracing:
Framework & Applications and the OCaml debugger. Cooool! (Thanks DanE!)

In my user studies, programmers used the debugger far less than I had expected. Part of that could perhaps be due to poor training in how to use a debugger — it is rare to get good training in how to use a debugger.

However, I think the answer is simpler than that: it is just plain boring and tedious to use a debugger. One guy did solve a thorny problem by stepping through the debugger, but he had to press “step over” or “step into” ninety times.

And when you are stepping, you must pay attention. You can’t let your mind wander, or you will miss the event you are watching for. I can’t be the only person who has done step, step, step, step, step, step, step, boom, “oh crap, where was I in the previous step?”

Omniscient debuggers are one way to make it less tedious. Run the code until it goes boom, then back up. Unfortunately, omniscient debuggers capture so much information that it becomes technically difficult to store/manage it all.

I suggest a compromise: store the last N contexts — enough to examine the state of variables back N levels, and to replay if desired.

I can imagine two different ways of doing this. In the first, the user still has to press step step step; the debugger saves only the state changes between the lines that the user lands on. In other words, if you step over the foo() method, the debugger only notes any state differences between entering and exiting the foo() method, not any state that is local to foo(). If the user steps into foo(), then it logs state changes inside foo().

In the other method, the user executes the program, and the debugger logs ALL the state changes (including in foo(), including calls to HashTable.add(), etc.). This is probably easier on the user, but probably slower to execute and requires more storage.

You could also do something where you checkpoint the state every M steps. Thus, if you get to the boom-spot and want to know where variable someVariable was set, but it didn’t change in the past N steps, you can

look at all your old checkpoints
see which two checkpoints someVariable changed between
rewind to the earlier of the two checkpoints
set a watchpoint on someVariable
run until the watchpoint.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Churchiness and torture

admin — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:47:54 +0000

CNN released a poll that showed that how often an American Christian goes to church corresponds strongly to how much he/she supports torture.

To a liberal, this makes no sense at all. The Golden Rule says to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves, right? And most people would not want to be tortured, right? What’s the deal?

It makes sense to me in light of Haight’s findings on morality. The people who go to church the most often are those for whom belonging to a group is most important, which ties to in-group loyalty. I can imagine that as in-group loyalty increases, desire to protect the in-group gets fiercer. Meanwhile, I can imagine that as in-group loyalty increases, respect for/value of people in the out-group decreases. To put it another way, the higher your loyalty to people who look like you, I bet the less interested you are in preserving the rights of people who don’t look like you.

This is not my value structure.

Update: A friend pointed me to a study that shows that participation in religious rituals (but not how often they prayed) predicts support for suicide bombing! This was true across cultures — Palestinian Muslims, Israeli Jews, Mexican Catholic, Indian Hindus, Russian Orthodox Christians, UK Protestants, and Indonesian Muslims. Furthermore, in some of the interviews, they “primed” the interviewee to think about religious affiliation before asking about support for suicide bombing; that turned out to significantly increase reported support for suicide bombing!

This paper thus seems to me to pretty strongly support the CNN poll, albeit indirectly. It seems to me that it not a great leap to replace

a suicide bomber from the in-group who kills members of the out-group

with

a torturer from the in-group who tortures members of the out-group.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: LOLcats ISO code

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:15:09 +0000

I’ve been working on LOLcat subtitles for Sita Sings The Blues, and a friend asked me what the ISO 639 language code for LOLcat was.

It turns out that the ISO 639 language code LOL does exist, and is for the central African language Mongo. Who knew that the kittehs were African!?!?

Update: My buddy Luther points out that the African Wildcat is the ancestor of the domesticated housecat. As he pointed out, “Duh.”

Update2: Luther also asks, “I can haz bank scam?”

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: On the record: I want torture prosecutions

ducky — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:40:06 +0000

A few days ago, I read something somewhere about how disappointing it was that there wasn’t more hue and cry about the recent release of the torture memos. (Sorry, my computer died and I was somewhat off the air for a few days, so don’t have a citation.)

Initially, I wasn’t going to blog about the release of the memos, but I feel I have to go on the record. I feel I have to say something in order to be counted, to make the “torture bad” side of the argument one voice stronger.

Initially, I wasn’t going to blog because I didn’t think any more needed to be said. I’ve already discussed why I think torture is a bad idea. (Never mind discussions about it being morally wrong, it’s still just flat a bad idea.) The things that I said — that I thought it was impossible to keep our torturing a secret, impossible to only torture guilty people, and that torture gave faulty information — proved true well before the memos were released.

I was angry and saddened at my country’s cavalier treatment of our military prisoners even before the memos were released. I had already seen routine torture at Abu Ghraib, and it was already known that we had waterboarded some prisoners. To hear that we waterboarded one guy 183 times was appalling, but I was already appalled that we did it at all. The difference between someone who knocks over 90 year-olds for fun and one who doesn’t is far starker than one who knocks over three seniors over versus one who knocks over 183.

I was already angry and saddened at how many of my fellow citizens thought torture was a hunky-dory method; just one more tool in the toolchest for waging war. To hear that Peggy Noonan thought we should not have released the memos — that we should just avert our eyes and walk on by was jaw-dropping, but my jaw has been on the floor for a long time.

The only thing that has changed is my attitude towards prosecution. I had gone along with the argument that we shouldn’t spend political capital on dragging something along that would devolve into partisan bickering. After seeing how stunningly in denial the Right-Wing is about torture being illegal, immoral, and ineffective, I now think we have to prosecute. If we don’t — if we continue to let a large portion of the country think that torture is okay — then we will torture again.

This is not about retribution. This is not about vengence. This is not even about justice. This is about prevention. This is about deterrence. This is about making sure that my country never goes down that slippery slope again.

Vincent Cheung: Right on Schedule

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:12:00 +0000

Happens every year. April 24th between 2:07pm and 2:12pm, the sun reflects off the ROM right through my window and into my eyes as I sit at my computer.

It's remarkable how accurate it all is. The accuracy of our calendar and clocks are remarkable and how steady the rotation of the Earth and its revolutions around the sun are pretty amazing when you think of it. Few things of what we understand as humans are this consistent.

Vincent Cheung: RIP Geocities

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:13:00 +0000

The plug has been pulled on Geocities.

I found the files for my old Geocities site on my computer and I uploaded it to my website:
http://www.vincentcheung.ca/geocities/

I made that site back in 1997 and it's pretty hilarious!

Things I love about it:

"You have come to the Best Web Page on the Internet. With great background music and hundreds of links to the best web pages throughout the World Wide Web, how can you go wrong?"

MIDI background music! (You can even change the background music and there's a great selection of 90's music!)

JavaScript pop-up on the homepage

Frames!

Ghetto logo

Link and banner exchange galore

Most of the links don't work anymore because the websites have been closed down

The instructions for adding the site to your bookmarks and setting it to your homepage is for Netscape 3.0 and Windows 95

"Page me by ICQ"

Google is not listed under "Search Engines"

Beakman's World in the TV section

The website predates Starcraft as it's not listed under "Video and Computer Games"

The selection of "Free 'Must-Have' Programs" is rather amusing

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: UBC programming team takes 34th in the world!

ducky — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:47:15 +0000

The UBC programming team took 34th place at the 2009 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals in Stockholm! W00t!!

This marks the sixth year in a row that UBC has gone to the World Finals, despite being entirely undergraduates and entirely without World Finals experience. (We have information on past teams, but don’t know the seniority of the 2004 team.)

Congratulations, team!

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Historical presidential maps

ducky — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 07:06:00 +0000

I recently got historical data on presidential election results by county from Robert Vanderbei, for presidential elections 1960-2004. While it is interesting to look at the raw data, I find it even more interesting to look at the differences between years, like the 2008 vs. 2004 map I commented on already. This helps separate how people felt about a particular pair of politicians from how liberal/conservative they are in general. For example, here’s the 1960 (Nixon vs. Kennedy) map, with Democratic counties in blue and Republican counties in red:

1960 -- Kennedy vs. Nixon

And here’s the 1964 (Johnson vs. Goldwater) map:

1964 -- Johnson vs. Goldwater

1964 Difference

You can see even from the 1964 map that LBJ was not very popular in the South (presumably because of his civil rights work), but the difference map below really hammers it home. In this map, it is blue if LBJ did better than Kennedy and red if the reverse. You can see from the difference map that the South really hated LBJ:

1964 results minus 1960 results

Another interesting thing about the 1960/1964 maps is that there is no evidence at all of “the black belt”. Here is a map of counties which were majority black in 2000, with darker green the stronger their majority:

Majority-black counties (2000)

I have to believe that blacks would have overwhelmingly voted for LBJ — if they were able. I think this is a pretty vivid demonstration of how thoroughly their voting rights were repressed.

1968 vs. 1960

The 1968 (McGovern-Nixon) minus 1964 map is basically an inverse of the 1964 minus 1960 map, basically because the southern antipathy towards Johnson was so strong that it skews everything. A more interesting map is to compare Humphrey vs. Nixon to Kennedy vs. Nixon:

1968 (Humphrey-Nixon) minus 1960 (Kennedy-Nixon)

Humphrey explicitly called for the Democrats to move away from states’ rights and towards civil rights, and that apparently played well in the upper Midwest and Northeast but not as well in the Southeast or West. You can also see a faint outline of Minnesota (where Humphrey was from) and a strong outline of Maine (where Muskie, the Democratic VP, was from). (Maryland, where Nixon’s VP Spiro Agnew was from, is too small to see in this picture.) You can maaaybe start to see the majority-black counties in some states, but not in Georgia.

There are some blue areas in the above map, but those probably would be red if it weren’t for George Wallace. Wallace ran as an independent, and did extremely well in southern states. It is unlikely that he took any votes away from Humphrey, as he was an outspoken proponent of segregation. While third-party candidates usually struggle to get over 10% of the vote, Wallace won a number of states outright. Here is a map of counties that he won outright:

Counties won by Wallace in 1968

1972

Nixon was re-elected in a landslide. Not only was McGovern staunchly anti-war during the Vietnam War, he was criticized for his first choice of running mate (who he fired). The only obvious counties on this map that voted more for McGovern than for Humphrey were in McGovern’s home state of South Dakota:

1972 (McGovern vs. Nixon) minus 1968 (Humphrey vs. Nixon)

1976

The Carter/Ford minus McGovern/Nixon map looks almost exactly the opposite, as the Watergate scandal destroyed Nixon’s and Ford’s standing. The South also rallied to Jimmy Carter, the first post-Civil War Southerner to be elected President.

1976 (Carter-Ford) minus 1972 (McGovern-Nixon)

1980

Jimmy Carter had his own troubles: the economy was in dire shape, in large part because of the rise in gas prices because of the second oil crisis. Carter also was not a strong leader: my memory of the time is that he suffered from what I called “Democrat’s dilemma”: being able to see all sides to all issues and thus unable to take a strong stand. Ronald Reagan, who exuded a forceful, “can-do” attitude, was more successful than the disgraced Ford almost everywhere:

1980 (Carter vs. Reagan) minus 1976 (Carter vs. Ford)

1984

Reagan got even more popular in large swaths of the country. Mondale could only manage to erode some of Reagan’s support in spots.

1984 (Mondale vs. Reagan) minus 1980 (Carter vs. Reagan)

Note that many of the blue counties above are areas of high Native American population. The map below shows counties where more than 30% of the people identify as Native Americans:

Counties with more than 30% Native American

I suspect that Reagan did something to upset Native Americans, but I don’t know what that was.

1988

George H.W. Bush was able to get elected in 1988, but he was pretty uniformly less successful than Reagan.

1988 (Dukakis vs. Bush41) minus 1984 (Mondale vs. Reagan)

1992

Bush continued to do worse in 1992, again pretty much across the whole country, losing to Clinton. Note that you can see the outline of Arkansas (home of Bill Clinton) clearly and Tennessee (home of Clinton’s VP Al Gore) somewhat.

1992 (Clinton vs. Bush41) minus 1988 (Dukakis vs. Bush41)

Ross Perot made a strong third-party run in 1992. I’m not sure who he took more votes from.

1992 third-party votes (mosty Perot)

1996

The Republicans made some inroads in 1996 in the West — especially in Bob Dole’s native Kansas (outline visible in the center of the country) — but it wasn’t enough. Clinton gained support in the upper Midwest, Northeast, Florida, Louisiana, and Southern Texas (which is heavily Latino).

1996 (Clinton vs. Dole) minus 1992 (Clinton vs. Bush41)

2000

Bush43 and Gore had a famously close race, but Bush43 did better than Dole almost everywhere (or Gore did worse than Clinton, depending on how you look at it).

2000 (Gore vs. Bush43) minus 1996 (Clinton vs. Dole)

2004

Bush43 strengthened his lead in the middle and southeast of the country in 2004, but lost support in some Northern and Western places:

2004 (Kerry vs. Bush43) minus 2000 (Gore vs. Bush43)

I’ve written about the 2008 vs. 2004 map already, so I won’t talk about it here. Instead, I think it is interesting to compare the 2008 election to the 1960 election, to see how the country’s party affiliations have changed:

2008 (Obama vs. McCain) minus 1960 (Kennedy vs. Nixon)

The biggest difference is that the Southeast is much, much more Republican now (except for minority-heavy areas: the Black belt and parts of Florida).

The New England states and the upper Midwest are much more Democratic. Native Americans voted heavily for Obama. Most importantly, perhaps, is that the Pacific coastal areas are much, much more Democratic than they were in 1960. (Those areas have also experienced a great deal of population growth, so this change is bigger than it looks.) The only area that seems like it stayed sort of the same is a belt running through Mossouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Kansas.

Note: The difference maps aren’t up on my maps page yet, but they hopefully will be soon.

Vincent Cheung: Dangerously close to summer

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:53:00 +0000

9-man volleyball practices started today. Afterwards, I went for lunch in Chinatown and walked around buying fruit off the street, Chinese buns, and bubble tea, all the while with the sun brimming in the sky. If only it wasn't so windy, making it a little chilly, it would've been so close to summer...

Vincent Cheung: Smells like poop

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 03:48:00 +0000

I just found a dried up piece of cat poop on the floor in the middle of my room. That explains why my room smelled like poop a few days ago. It really smelled like poop and it was bad. At the time, I couldn't find the source and I didn't think it was Tiki because I know that she took a poop in the litter box that morning and it didn't smell the same. I thought maybe b/c it was windy that the bathroom vents were flowing the wrong way.

My worry now is that the poop I found was a broken off piece and I still don't know where the rest of it is. Also, how did it get to the middle of my room?...

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Dream date

ducky — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:32:56 +0000

I’ve had a constant question running in the back of my head for a long time, “Who would you have dinner with if you could?” (I talked about this a little in the post about Steve Wozniak.)

I have expanded it a little to which three people I would like to be at the same table with, or even just to witness. I’ve decided that my dream dinner team is Randall Munroe of xkcd, Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.

How to go about pulling that off is a trickier matter. Step one would probably be to do something really interesting, such that I would be a desirable dinner date…

David Anderson: New times, new skin

David Anderson — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:33:10 +0000

Sam graciously presented me today with a new CSS stylesheet for my Zwe blog. It really was time for a bit of a change, as the previous stylesheet was starting to show its age after many upgrades and changes to the underlying engine. Hope you like it. I certainly do.

Thanks Sam!

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Sovereignty of the people

ducky — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:40:40 +0000

Recently, the California Supreme Court heard arguments in a case designed to overturn California’s Proposition 8, which overturned the judicial decision that gay and lesbian people had the right to marry. While I didn’t watch the hearings myself, I understand that Ken Starr (the defending attorney) basically put forth the belief that a majority vote could strip rights of minority.

People who are better than I at guessing what the outcome will be by examining the questions, tone, and body language of the justices think that they will rule against overturning Proposition 8, in part because they think that the California Domestic Partnership gives all of the same rights as marriage. Essentially, they are fighting over a word, with Starr’s side saying that a bare majority of the citizens can take away gay and lesbian people’s right to use the word “marriage”.

There was a Canadian political figure, Stockwell Day, who seemed to have similar beliefs in the rights of the majority over the rights of a minority. He pushed for a law that would have required a referendum on any proposal supported by a petition signed by 3% of Canadian voters. He stopped talking about this when Rick Mercer (sort of Canada’s Jon Stewart) called for a national petition forcing Stockwell Day to change his first name to “Doris”.

Perhaps the correct response to Proposition 8 is to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot requiring Ken Starr to change his first name to “Brenda”.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: The view from our Canadian window

ducky — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:12:18 +0000

If you know us, you know we have raved about the view from our apartment. It’s not the absolute best view in the world, but it is pretty stunning to a gal from the flat lands and buildings of Champaign, IL.

That picture (and an absolutely ginormous version) were taken and stitched together by Randy Stewart from Seattle.

Randy apparently walked into our apartment, said, “Oh my god!” or something such, and dashed into our bedroom to take pictures. Our other dinner guest, from metropolitan Canada, was slightly perplexed/bemused by his reaction. It is completely ordinary for people in cities in Canada to live in high-rise apartments.

Randy (and Jim and I) are from the US. It is very uncommon for people to live in high-rises in the US. If I think really hard, of all the thousands and thousands of people I have known, I can only think of six households who I know ever lived above the sixth floor, and one more who I think might have had a high-rise condo a few years ago. (And three of those households were in the same building in Mountain View.) That is it, period, total, everybody, and I had to think pretty hard to come up with that meagre ration.

Why are there so few high-rise residences in the US? There are many factors. I am by no means an expert, but these are a few:

The American Dream of owning your own house is cliche for a reason. It is assumed that if you don’t own your own house, at least you aspire to owning your own house. To not aspire to have your own house is sort of like not wanting to own a TV.
When renting, you generally get more square feet per dollar in a shared house than in an apartment, especially a shared apartment. Even I, through all my moves, have only lived in four apartments in the US, and two of those were while I was a student.
In some places, the only high-rises around were “the projects” — government-built and -run publicly-subsidized housing. Thus high-rises were decidedly un-sexy.
In California, where one-eighth of the US lives, cities can’t afford dense housing.
California has earthquakes, which makes people nervous about high-rises, even though high-rises constructed to modern codes are much safer in earthquakes than older houses on landfill or alluvial floodplains.
Traditionally, cheap gas has meant that it was feasible to live quite a ways from work.
In the US, not having a car can have a significant negative impact on the quality of your life, parking is difficult in cities, and very few US cities have good public transportation systems. The poor transportation is due partly to density, but also part to the easy availability of guns. Many people in the US are afraid of taking public transportation.

You should also note that Vancouver has worked very hard to develop its downtown. The fact that it has a vibrant and vertical downtown was the result of very deliberate and careful urban planning, not an accident of fate.

Vincent Cheung: Shape Collage 2.1

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:40:00 +0000

Shape Collage 2.1 has been released!

There are a couple new features, some performance tweaks, and some bug fixes. The coolest new feature is the ability to add photos from the web. Just give it *any* webpage that has pictures on it and Shape Collage will automagically download the pictures from that webpage for use in the collage! This does not however, work for sites that require you to login, like Facebook, but that's what FaceDown is for.

Other new features include the ability to adjust the rotations of the photos and the drop shadow. The program settings are now saved between sessions so if you like the settings a certain way, you don't have to set them every time.

I promise that this blog is not becoming an advertisement for Shape Collage and VincentCheung.ca. I will be blogging about my vacation (eventually) :p

Vincent Cheung: Shape Collage Around The World

noreply@blogger.com (Vince) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:27:00 +0000

Think of a language.... got it? Well, it's probably in the list below.

Shape Collage has been written about in at least 22 languages! Here's a small sampling of sites from around the world talking about Shape Collage. I arbitrarily chose sites that either had nice collages or gave me a lot of traffic and they are ordered under each language approximately as to when the page appeared, with the oldest first.

English

gHacks

Apple

Chris Pirillo (YouTube video)

Cameratown (YouTube video)

Idenzine

Softonic

MacReviewCast (Podcast)

AddictiveTips

Techblissonline

PhotographyBlog

Rj Dollen (Cool art using Shape Collage)

Digital Inspiration

Lifehacker

TWIP

MacHeist (Where's Waldo)

Macbreak Weekly (Podcast @ 1:33:45)

Spanish

chickageek

GeeksRoom

Geek.ms

Softonic

UpToDown

Visual Beta

TechnoBITA

Entrebits

Nivmar

Sebalorenzo

TecnoBITA

Jorge Serrano

arturogoga (YouTube)

Portuguese

Baixaki (Screencast)

Misto Quente

bernabauer.com

WinAjuda

Italian

maestroalberto

ManuIdea

Pucciom

Gekissimo

Click|blog.it

guidami

ilarialab.com

Tutto Volume

polycoke

Il Bloggatore

Chinese

Pobby-dog Blog

Jinn's Blog

Lawrence's Coffee Shop

unkb.com

UIUI

Hong Kong Yahoo Blogs (wedding photos in the shape of a heart)

Japanese

Oshiete-Kun

Gigafree

yknakamimi

hatena

Nutspress

Lifehacker.jp

Moongift

National Creators Conference

Korean

SimFilePC

Krang

Drchoi Blog

WalkPC

French

fdoun

Cyrille Borne

Vincent Dutrait

Glandouillage

MaxiApple

Guppytrucs Freeware

ZDNet.fr

German

Roman bloggt

Gif-Bilder

drweb.de

Apfel

Ehrensenf (Video)

Blogwiese

Russian

Lexi_Ru

Russian Apple Community

Deep Apple

Fotokolo

baboker (Video)

catode

Polish

PC blog

Programosy

Fotomaniak

Fotopolis

Skrzypol

Romanian

Catholica NETwork

Topo's Page

efoto

Hungarian

beszeljukmac

Techline

kepszerkesztok

szoftverbazis

Sablonos Blog

Turkish

TurkMac

pdfdergi

Dutch

PhotoPlace.nl

Clickx

fotoplezier

Kindje op Komst

Finnish

DigiCamera

Malay

Syamsu

Agusbagus

Serbian

Serbain Macintosh User Group

Swedish

dahlstroms

stationsvakt

Veronicas Foto

Arabic

Rehla Online

SUAE

Icelandic

sfjalar

Latvian

Bedre

LatFoto

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Dangers of email

ducky — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:05:05 +0000

This happened back in late 1994 or early 1995, but thinking about it still makes me laugh…

Ben Johnson, a graduate student at the University of Illinois developed a wonderful, wonderful webmail tool called @ATS to help NCSA provide email support for Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser. I was good friends with Mitch, who was in charge of Macintosh tech support for Mosaic, so I heard about it. I could see that it would be immensely helpful answering all the email questions I got in the course of my job as www.uiuc.edu webmaster, so talked NCSA/Ben into letting me use it also. Ben warned me that it was still quite new and under development, but I didn’t care — it made my life much easier even in that early stage.

Back in those days, there wasn’t nearly as much spam. The very first commercial Usenet spam had only come out in January 1994. Thus I was a little surprised to get a message to the webmaster account with an extremely pornographic subject line, and a body that was a word salad of dirty words.

I forwarded the message to Mitch, and asked in the body of the message, “Do you get messages like this frequently?” I got back a message from Mitch saying that yes, he did sometimes get messages like to the Mosaic support email address. Fine. I forgot about it.

The next day, I saw Ben. He said that he had needed to do some troubleshooting of @ATS, and had to go into my account to check something out. I had developed a webmail system myself, so empathized. This seemed perfectly understandable and reasonable to me. He continued by assuring me that he was only there for a moment and emphasized vigorously that he did not look in any of the messages, only at the subject lines.

I think he was puzzled but relieved when I burst out laughing.

I did explain why Mitch sent me a message with the subject

Subject: Re: verb your feminine-noun

and let Ben know that he didn’t need to inform the higher-ups about potential sexual harassment.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: The two “Progressives”

ducky — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:10:03 +0000

Wow, Nate Silver just nailed it today. His posting on the two different meanings of the word “progressive” seemed very clear and resonated completely with me. I am, based on his definitions, absolutely a rational progressive.

Manas Tungare: My custom LaTeX styles

Manas — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 17:51:20 +0000

By popular demand, my custom LaTeX styles are now available for download. (All of them have been dedicated to the public domain, I disclaim all copyright.)

There are four for now, but the set will grow. The first lets you use OpenType fonts (which is pretty much any system font); the limitation is that this works only with a single distribution, XeTeX, available only for Mac OS X, and a new experimental build for Linux. A second style typesets all chapter titles, sections, subsections and subsections in a sans-serif font (instead of the default serif). Very effective when used in conjunction with the OpenType style.

The final two adjust margins to require less paper for draft prints and such. Be good, be green.

Manas Tungare: One-button Phone Number Sharing

Manas — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:52:17 +0000

How often have you found yourself calling a friend to get the phone number of a mutual friend? And then having to hold the phone while your friend pulls up the contact list on their phone, then recites the number to you, and then you write it on paper because your phone won’t let you add contacts while you’re on a call, and then you misplace the number you wrote on paper, ad nauseum. Why isn’t there a single button that says “Send this Phone Number to the Current Caller”?

It’s a common problem. You’re out and about, and realize you need to call a specific person, but you don’t have their phone number (or more often, you have it on your desktop computer, or your laptop, but that doesn’t do you any good in the current situation.) So you decide that the best thing to do is to call a mutual friend and ask them.

When they receive a phone call from you, they’re fumbling to hold the call while they look in their address book. (That is, if they’re lucky, and if their phone actually lets them open the contact list while they’re on a call.) More often, what happens is that they tell you to hang up while they consult their address book. And then you have to hunt for a piece of scrap paper because your phone won’t let you add a number to the list like that.

What the world needs is a button next to each phone number in the contact list that only appears whenever you’re on a call. The button, when pressed, sends an SMS from you to the current caller, and contains within it the information from the contact record you just selected. It doesn’t have to be too fancy, a two-line VCF record should do nicely.

If the recipient’s phone understands this method of contact transfer, it can prompt the user and import it automatically. If not, the user can still read the SMS herself, and dial the number. No more paper, no more fumbling, no more “let me call you back”.

It’s so easy, a caveman could do it. If only phones implemented it!

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: New map: stimulus spending

ducky — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:21:54 +0000

I made a new map of where the stimulus spending was forecast to go. I pulled the data from the White House Web site a few days ago, so note that it is for the proposed stimulus bill, not the bill as it passed. Also, it shows per capita amounts, using 2006 population figures from Wikipedia, so there will be a minor error due to the years being different.

I didn’t make a lot of noise about this one because I hope to do another, better one when the numbers are more stable.

Jobs created or saved per capita

Manas Tungare: My Research Philosophy

Manas — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:15:58 +0000

I wrote this recently, not as a blog post, but for another purpose. I figured I’d post it here like I do everything else.

Re•search: noun. Investigation or experimentation aimed at the discovery and interpretation of facts, revision of accepted theories or laws in the light of new facts, or practical application of such new or revised theories or laws.

—Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

The last part of that definition has always been the chief motivator for me in my research — practical application. While all research seeks to discover universal truths and deeper meaning, I strongly believe that researchers have a responsibility to contribute to society in other tangible ways as well.

Just as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1439 made literary works accessible to everyone, the Internet is likewise speeding up the propagation of knowledge now and will continue to do so in the decades to come. We are on the brink of a cultural revolution where ideas, prototypes, discussion and research know no boundaries of location or time. The Free Software Movement is promoting users’ freedom to understand and explore computer programs. The Creative Commons project encourages authors, scientists, artists and educators to distribute their creations under licenses that foster the sharing of ideas, encourage discussion, engender a culture of openness, and speed up innovation. This provides enormous opportunities for researchers to collaborate in real-time across institutions, countries and continents, and to serve the community by disseminating their research results via public blogs, videos, slides, prototypes and designs.

As a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at the Dept. of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, I have developed several tools and prototypes that would be of benefit not just to researchers but also to computer users. It is by studying their habits that I designed these tools — to them, I owe these tools. I work in the area of Personal Information Management (PIM), and study how users access and manage information such as files, calendars, email messages, contacts and bookmarks on multiple devices. I release all such tools and software to the world at my web site under licenses that permit anyone to inspect the source code, build upon it, and benefit from it.

In the process of my research, I developed a program to access Google Calendar which now has over 25,000 users. A calendar converter program I wrote is used by an average of more than 200 users per day. During Sustainability Week 2008 at Virginia Tech, I released a Blacksburg Transit Schedule application for cell phones to encourage Blacksburg citizens to take the bus instead of driving. It is used by about 300 users every month and growing.

In the spirit of working on real products that are used by real people, I interned at Google three times during my Ph.D. (2005, 2006, 2007.) In 2007, my project enabled users of Google Book Search to clip personalized content from books and embed that into their own web site or blog. This enables teachers to excerpt from literary classics for their class home page, for literature scholars to debate the nuances of texts, and for commentators to dissect parts of books. My intern work was covered by several news outlets, chief among them, at Google’s Corporate Blog.

Academia encourages published work—publish or perish, they say—while original contributions such as new ideas and untested directions are undervalued in the traditional ways of evaluating research. The Internet changes that too. Several times when I have come up with ideas that may or may not be viable research projects, I have written about them on my blog. The public scrutiny and invaluable feedback I’ve received made it easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. My advisor has always been supportive of those ideas that were encouraging research directions: the latest among them resulted in a paper that has been nominated for the ACM SIGCHI Student Research Competition 2009.

An area that I have recently been concerned about is the open publication of raw data sets. I perform human experiments which are reviewed by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for ethical compliance. There is inherent tension between the privacy implications of human experiments and the Open Science dream of being able to publish all experimental data publicly so that others may analyze it in novel ways. I plan to investigate the ethical, moral and legal responsibilities of such an endeavor, recognizing that we as researchers owe two allegiances: to our experiment participants and to the scientific community, in that order.

I am happy to be a researcher at a time in our history when competitive collaboration trumps closed confidentiality. Science and innovation can only progress faster when information is freely shared among researchers, scholars and citizens.

David Anderson: Sport

David Anderson — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:21:18 +0000

Dear diary,

Yesterday, I played Wii Sports for 5 hours. Today, I have aches in muscles I'd forgotten I had.

That was fun.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood: Election 2008 / Demographics map

ducky — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:13:18 +0000

I made a demo of my new mapping framework, a choropleth map of the 2008 presidential election that you can combine with various demographic layers, zoom in, zoom out, change the colour mapping, and all kinds of good things.

The base layer is a map of the election results by county. Here it is with all the controls clipped off:

Voting margin layer

Blue counties are ones where more people voted for Obama; red counties voted for McCain. The intensity of the colour shows how big the spread between the two candidates was. Counties are white if the race was close.

A liberal friend of mine said with some dismay, “That’s an awful lot of red!” That’s true, but most of those red counties have very few people in them. One way to get a sense of how few people live in the center of the country is to overlay ZIP code locations (presumably the centers of the ZIP codes):

Voting layer with ZIP codes overlay

(The ZIP layer is even more interesting in bigger images. I’m showing cropped, tiny versions of the map; you can select medium and huge sizes too.)

Another way to see the population density is to overlay the population density layer on top of the voting layer. I set the population density layer to go from full white at zero people per square mile to full green at 400 people per square mile:

Voting layer plus population density overlay

Note that 400 people per square mile is still very, very low compared to urban areas. (New York City has around 50,000 people per square mile. Some census tracts in San Francisco have around 200,000 people per square mile; San Quentin has a density of 250,000 people per square mile.) I recommend playing with the colour mapping to get a sense of how dramatically unevenly the country is populated.

The next thing to look at is where the Obama voters were. In addition to urban areas, racially diverse areas went for Obama pretty stunningly consistently. If you lay the percent-White layer on top of the voting layer, it is really striking how often the blue of an Obama county coincides with the white of a low-percent-White county. In the percent-White overlay in this map, full white corresponds to 70% of the population or less being White, while full green corresponds to 100% White:

Voting layer plus percent-White overlay

You can see that the West Coast and the South are more racially diverse, as well as some odd, isolated islands of blue in the middle of the country — mostly in the Mountain time zone. What are those odd blocks?

Those isolated patches of high-Obama, low-White correlate with Native American population. Here is a map of the percent-Native, with full white corresponding to 70% Native population and full green corresponding to 100% Native population. (I turned off the voting layer in the next picture.)

Percent Native American Layer

Not every place with a high Native population went for Obama. For example, Oklahoma has a high Native population, but Oklahoma went for McCain pretty reliably.

The sharp-eyed viewer will note a few blue counties in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming that do not have a high percentage of Native Americans. These are the urban areas of Butte and Missoula, plus the resort areas of Sun Valley and Jackson Hole.

A prominent feature on the electoral layer is the blue crescent in the South. That corresponds neatly with high concentrations of African-Americans. On the demographic layer on this map, full white corresponds to 0% African-American and full green corresponds to 50% African-American:

Voting layer plus percent Black layer

You can see correlation between Latino populations and Obama voters, although it isn’t as strong a correlation as elsewhere. In the demographic layer of the map below, full white is 0% Latino and full green is 50% Latino:

Voting layer plus percent Latino layer

Finally, there are some pale counties in the Midwest that are surrounded by red counties. I haven’t looked at each and every one, but I think they are college towns. Here’s a zoomed-in overlay of median age over the voting layer, with full white corresponding to a median age of 25 and full green to a median age of 45:

Voting layer plus median age layer

The areas that voted for Obama that can’t be explained by population density, racial diversity, or college towns are the upper midwest (e.g. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa) and the upper Northeast (e.g. Maine and Vermont). Obama spent a lot of time in Iowa, but I guess the others are just intrinsically liberal.

I also have point-based overlays for locations of Walmarts and health food stores. During the campaign, Fivethirtyeight.com talked frequently talked about the Walmart-to-Starbucks ratio, so I wanted to show those. Unfortunately, although I found a database of Starbucks locations, I wasn’t able to get permission to use it on my maps. (It’s a pity, because Starbucks locations seemed to correlate very well with Obama votes.) I bought data of Walmart locations and health food stores (figuring that health food stores would be a squishy liberal kind of thing) but eyeballing the data didn’t really convince me there was a correlation. But you can go try it out for yourself.

You can also see the locations of all 756 Native / Alaskan / Hawai’ian reservations from the dots layer.

Finally, I have a layer that shows the total votes (Obama + McCain + everyone else) divided by the population. I don’t know how much to trust this layer, as the demographic data I have is from the 2000 census. Areas that gained or lost a lot of people in the past eight years will be skewed. While the demographic data in all the demographic layers will be slightly off, it will be worse for this layer, especially in counties that don’t have a lot of people. (Loving County, TX, had 79 presidential votes in 2008 but only 67 total population in 2000.) Rural counties tend to have more land area than urban counties, so visually they will be overrepresented.

I encourage you to go play with the maps. In particular, I had to use zoom level 3 in order to get maps that would fit on my blog, but you lose a lot of detail and information. Also, when you aren’t worrying about running afoul of Google’s copyrights, you can let the map layer peek through to give you more context for what you are seeing.

Enjoy!