The Ayman and Naaman Show

Hello, academia! One of Naaman’s new responsibilities is, of course, teaching. In the long run, the teaching load will be comprised of courses that are driven by my own research interest (Social Media class? Mobile Information?), as well as core courses in information science. I had tons of fun teaching Research Methods to a great group of MLIS students last semester. This spring, I will be teaching Retrieving And Evaluating Electronic Information to undergrads:

“In this course, students examine and analyze the information retrieval process in order to more effectively conduct electronic searches, assess search results, and use information for informed decision making. Major topics include search engine technology, human information behavior, evaluation of information quality, and economic and cultural factors that affect the availability and reliability of electronic information.”

Now there’s a topic that can had launched a thousand PhD theses… how do I pack it into one semester? As I see it, the class should be a combination of “how to” and “how it works”: both understanding how the technologies work and how to use it best (these are of course interrelated).

For now, I have the class set up in the following way (with thanks to Marie, Nina and Nick who taught this class before me):

First I will spend time discussion the basics of how to search. Starting from the very basic how to choose/iterate on keywords, through boolean operators and advanced search functions. Then, I will spend a few sessions talking about search technology, or how search engines work (you know, crawling/indexing/ranking). I believe that everyone should have an understanding of how search works in order to realize the bias and limitations inherent in the process. In the middle I will discuss the presentation of search results as well as the topic of browsers.

All this will take me 8-9 sessions (1.15 hours each) out of a total of about 25.

Then, beyond the generic search, there are other sources of retrieving information, even on the web. Directories, reference sites (e.g., dictionaries but many more) and business databases. Of course, specialized databases like, say, academic libraries and other digital libraries play a major role in this world, especially for university undergrads.

This concludes the very basic “what you need to know” about retrieving information. And about half the class sessions. But we’re only getting warmed up. Here are a dump of additional topics I am planning to cover: news, breaking information and tracking topics (alerts and feeds); Web Reference Tools (from Wikipedia to Yahoo Answers), which of course leads to the topic of information reliability; publishing information on the Web; economics of information (here’s another topic that can last a few semesters); legal aspects of information use (e.g., copyright issues, Creative Commons); bookmarking and knowledge collections; social media and blogs, and Multimedia search (of course).

This, together with student presentations and exams, will pretty much conclude the class. But there’s so much else one can cover… here’s what I left out for now: ethical and cultural aspect of information; information overload; mobile information retrieval; the semantic web (ok, “semantics on the web” maybe a better title); personal information management (e.g., Stuff I’ve Seen); non-text retrieval (e.g. location-driven information); the hidden web; Web of Data; phew!

Now, our undergraduate program at SCILS offers classes that touch in depth on many of these issues. But can I possibly leave these topics out from any basic retrieval of information class? Doesn’t everyone need to know about these? Is there anything else I left out that must be covered?

Whatever form the class takes, I am excited. Mostly, I am curious to see what undergrads these days know about search, and how their perceptions can change in 14 short weeks.

Hey Naaman - having a nice holiday?  Still thinking about your grandparent?  I never met mine.

Over the past few days, I was doing some hacking. Well actually ./configuring.  You see, I got myself a media server which does uPnP.  And, I was building MediaTomb to get my mac to transcode and send videos on the fly to the server.  Took some doing.  You see I had two package managers installed on my MacBook for several wrong reasons.  So I did an rm -rf on Fink…leaving me with MacPorts (google those yourself if you like).  MediaTomb wasn’t my real problem.  You see I wanted it to hook to FFMPEG to make thumbnails and transcode as it streams.

This brought me to the ffmpegthumbnailer-1.3.0 project on Google Code.  I couldn’t get it to configure (which you have to do before you can compile it).  OK - so i set some flags:

$ env CPPFLAGS=’-I/opt/local/include’ LDFLAGS=’-L/opt/local/lib’ PKG_CONFIG=’/opt/local/bin/pkg-config’ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=’/opt/local/lib/pkgconfig’ ./configure

And it still dies.  Turns out, you have to install some variants along with FFMPEG.  Long story short:

$ sudo port install ffmpeg +gpl +lame +x264 +xvid +avfilter

This will put all the libs in place so you can compile happily.  Now I wanted to share my findings (in more detail).  SO I turned to the WIKI for the project.  And I can’t post my instructions.  So where do I post it?  How do I share my findings to help others?  How do they find it?  Really? Am I left to leaving ppl to google around to find something and maybe see my humble blog post?

It seems while we build communities for photos sharing, throwing zombies, and taking photos (and any mix thereof) - communities for builders are overlooked.  Cast somewhere between DIY and blog posts of command line args.  Think someone might help us eventually? GitHub - I’m looking in your general direction.

I am told that Thanksgiving is not just about eating (I’ve grown to really like Thanksgiving food) but also football. And family competitions. Oh, and (at least American) ancestry. Which is funny, because this week I discovered that my academic ancestry can be traced back to the late 1600s or even earlier.

Yes, I am an academic now, I am allowed to be interested in these things.

My academic grandfather, Gio Wiederhold, has been maintaining a (up-and-down) tree on his page, meaning we can examine his academic decedents as well as his ancestors. Recently, Panos (who is behind the enemy lines) also published a slightly better-formatted version of the tree, going back in time (no decendents yet). Panos is an academic “nephew” of mine - did I just made up a new concept? - his academic grandfather was my advisor, which means we share most of our tree…

What do we learn from the tree? Horrible truths. Well, at least one: turns out my lineage includes a relative recent component of Ayman’s own school! Northwestern’s Carl Porter Duncan (4 generations back), was a psychology professor at Northwestern. Duncan was the PhD advisor of John Amsden Starkweather (three generations), who was Gio’s advisor and the first in my lineage to work on “computer science” topics (at the Departmet of Psychiatry in UCSF).

It’s not surprising that my roots are in psychology given that computer science did not exist as a field before, say, the 1950s (information science in some forms goes way back, but modern information departments are relatively new). My psychology roots go far back, and include the first psychology professor in the US (8 generations) and one of the “fathers of modern psychology” (9 generations). It gets murkier from there, but basically a bunch of physicians show up, mostly in Leipzig, and finally we run into Otto Mencke (18 generations).

And, other than my esteemed direct ancestors, in the expanded family tree you will also find Carl Friedrich Gauss and David Hilbert, if you are willing to go way back. Which does not reflect any of Naaman, unfortunately, but I still think it is cool.

Who’s in your tree, Ayman?

Otto Mencke - any similarity?

Yes, Naaman, there is a Thanksgiving.  Our families are gathered up in the bigger houses, planning dinner, and finding some way for several adults and kids to get along.  This year brings me to Atlanta.  This year also makes the Wii the supreme ruler of all that is collaborative game play.  Well that and a Harry Potter trivia game which you just can’t win against a 10 year old.

I’ve not been a big fan of the Wii.  I don’t hate it either.  But its never really got me to run and buy one.  I like the controller because it really re-thinks modality.  Then again, I like the PS style controller because it has accuracy and feels more like, well, a video game - rather than shaking the last bit of ketchup out of a bottle.  The Wii controller does have a nice advantage - small kids can easily use it.  And thats really cool to see a 2 year old play a simple game that lasts 20 seconds.

And so, after several rounds of proving I was indeed a better jedi than the rest of the family and a few rounds of having a pickachu vs mario battle - I decided to get my older brother a birthday gift: FIFA 09.  My brother and I have an established history around this game; his two young boys were puzzled by our elation.  This didn’t look ‘cool’ nor did it have super powerups or cheat codes visible (some games now a days have a ‘cheat code’ menu item for you to enter the code - what ever happened to L L R R U Fire?)

We loaded the first game and proceeded to our normal epic battle of England v Argentina - the two boys scanned the other menu items.  “Look daddy you can play with your Mii” “oh wow you can buy stuff at the FIFA store with game points”  “You can play a FooseBall Game!”  Yet we older people, just clicked on through to our match….and the boys proceeded to look at the manual.  I admire EA for making kiddie style games so you can pass the controller back to someone who doesnt care to play as Didier Drogba.

Not knowing the Wii controls, we fumble around a bit as the boys try to explain to us what the bars, numbers, and letters mean.  With each explanation, we would politely say “This isn’t about energy boost” or “It doesn’t really matter if the player is hurt” or, my favorite, “Really, I wouldn’t rather play with my Mii”—Thought the boys did make me a nice avatar before I showed up.

As they began to see what we were doing they would point out, well, the obvious “oh now you can select where you want to pass the ball - that’s new!”  We tell them no its not.  “Oh hit shows you the spin of the kick”  Um, that’s also not new. Whats interesting is, they didn’t comment about the graphics or game play realism.  And why should they.  But they did once ask if this was like the TV soccer.  They sought to find out what made this game new for the Wii and were insistent that there was something unique about it (they were right, there is an advanced play mode where you can point with the remote to place the ball).

Finally, as we made it to half time, I said “so you know we’ve been playing EA FIFA since before you boys were born.  Its really been the same game all this time.  Its not about the power ups or the realism or the Miis or the advanced play control”.

“Whats it about then?” asked one.

Before I could respond, my brother says “It’s about beating your sibling senselessly and trying not to get a red card.”

“Oh” said the boys and nothing else.

The next evening when I handed the remote to the boys to play, one of them asked me only one question “now how do i slide tackle again?”  I smiled and thought there was indeed there was hope for the universe.

Naaman is being persuaded - and even more excitingly, serving as a bridge for persuasion! BJ Fogg and gang had long pointed out the potential of Facebook (and social media) as a persuasive platform. The Causes application on Facebook had been using persuasive elements from the start, and has a significant following (20,000,000 monthly active according to Facebook stats). Causes is cleverly using the social influence potential of Facebook to draw people into supporting various non profits and similar efforts (critics and cynics would say “to satisfy one’s concious while sitting comfortably at a computer screen”). I don’t know when they started to use the birthday information on Facebook, but that’s smart, too: the birthday is arguably the one day a year I have any kind of influence over my friends, if any… right Ayman? Here’s what I got:

Happy (Almost) Birthday!

Thanks to Facebook, in two weeks all of your friends will see that it’s your birthday. Instead of just writing on your wall, or giving you something you don’t need, what if they had a chance to help a cause you believe in? Whether you want to raise money for clean water in Ethiopia, vaccinations for children in Haiti, or a safe home for a puppy in Mississipi, with a Birthday Cause your friends can give in honor of your special day.

Select your Birthday Cause today: Get Started - Learn More

Have a very happy birthday,
The Causes Team

That’s pretty smart. What should I choose? And yes, my birthday is coming up!

In other persuasion news, using YouTube this time (thanks Sagee), Monty Python wants to both free their content and get you to pay for it. Pretty cool assuming they will make all content available and will not fight fans that upload content that the MP’s do not want on the site.

If you live around Pomona, come see me talk today at 4.15 pm in the CS Colloquium.

http://www.cs.pomona.edu/colloquium.html

Oh and check out the past talk schedule.  Seems attendance is mandatory for my talk and optional for Buzz Aldrin.  Crazy!

So I noticed a few things happened while I was dancing in the streets of San Francisco. First, Naaman posted to our humble blog without mentioning me in the post.  Second, my friend the Practicalist posted several maps of “New York Times Election Results: County by County“.  The maps are indeed beautiful.  But I thought to myself to see the change.  This leads my mind down a wonderful path where I envisioned a beautiful movie done up in Processing and leaves you, the reader, with a very rough difference map I forced Photoshop to spit out.

A few things to note. I’ll point out that I’m a Photoshop expert. It takes all kinds of mad skills to make it produce something quite ugly. Next, notice the bright pinkish spot growing around Arkansas: that’s a Blue to Red shift that’s been happening in the past 16 years.  Brown colors are a shift to Blue from Red.

Maybe I’ll make something more pretty next time with more granularity. Meanwhile, if you’re headed to CSCW, stop me or naaman and say hi!

I haven’t written about Fire Eagle in a while but: this is supercool. When we started thinking about FireEagle this was a large portion of the vision we have in mind - information services that tune in on your location and offering you slightly better services - not necessarily radically better - just slightly better - but because of the ease of intergration, provide a location-based service that other would not be available.

So now, my phone talks to Fire Eagle and tells it where I am, while Headup recognizes objects (such as band names) on websites and tell me about nearby events, or shows my photos taken nearby when I visit Flickr.

Now this is the part where Naaman takes credit for introducing the Tals[1] who run Headup/Semantinet to Fire Eagle (first) and the team (second). A beginning of a beautiful friendship, I hope.

[1] Seriously - two guys named Tal.

LinkedIn is one of those sites which, if you still have a job and a you do have life, you only see if something happens (e.g., somebody sends you an invitation). The other day, I got (yet another) invitation, clicked through, and actually even browsed around (to try to figure out if I actually know the person that invited me - it wasn’t Ayman).

They had an ad on that page (bastards!). The ad was actually intriguing - it was designed as a survey, sponsored by Mazda, with a simple question: do you think your car should reflect who you are, or is it just for getting yourself around. Curiosity won over, and I clicked (which one you think I chose? I am not the Racing Geek, remember).

Now the interesting part. Because LinkedIn are so successful in getting your real-life information (jobs, gender, whatever) they were showing the results (”just for getting around” winning 60-40!) broken down to various categories: size of company, position, type of industy. This shows you what a powerful business ad platform LinkedIn could be - for example, you could advertise only to mid-level managers of high-tech companies size 100-500.

On the other hand, if you want to advertise to the youth, you are in the wrong place. Dead wrong:

I totally agree with FiveThiryEight’s Nate, arguing against broadcasting the presidential debate while including on-screen immediate responses from focus groups. It is one thing to have a Hack The Debate discussion showing Twitter messages over the video stream - this is social media, participation that reflect opinion and is expected to be biased. However, continuously showing responses of so-called “testing groups” (shown in the bottom of the screen below) is something entirely different. Not only the opinions of this group could not possibly represent the population or even the undecided voters, as Nate correctly points out. Worse, the presentation completely robs the debate from its status as the last sanctuary of actualcontent (Palin aside) instead of meta-analysis.

Mindless random crowd likey Obama response!

The elections are not a spectator sport. CNN wants us to believe it’s all about the race, while it should be all about the issues. The debate was the last place where you could really hear about the issues (Palin aside). Even following the #current Twitter messages during the debate showed a reasonable sense of discussion - mostly personal views and comments on the content. But on CNN? It was all about winning and losing, in the most immediate and stupid sense of the word. Couldn’t take my eyes off the screen! This is no social media, even if it has people in it.