Okay, so I don't get out much, but last night I was at South Coast Plaza and stumbled across this iPod vending machine. I had heard that such things existed before, but I didn't think I would run into one unless I was in an alley in Japan. It turns out that there is one in Macy's.

It is iPod branded, but has Sony and other other company products in it also. There is one screen in the upper left with marketing videos running in a loop and a touch screen on the right for picking your gadget.

There was clearly a security concern as there was a special video camera watching it and it was in the middle of a Macy's, not in an alley in Japan.

So now, if it is too much trouble to get your iPod from the Apple Store 50 feet away, you can use the vending machine instead.

From: Mechanical Turk Best Practices - O'Reilly Radar

"For most users of mechanical turk (us included), it has become an API call that fits smoothly within their workflow. (Or as someone at the meetup wryly suggested, turk is a Remote Person Call.) The last pair of speakers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, reminded us that behind mechanical turk lies thousands of workers† ("the crowd in the cloud") working without (health care) benefits, oftentimes at extremely low hourly wages. Irani and Silberman suggested that rather than abstracting mechanical turk services as mere API calls, users should start thinking of the plight of the turks ("Mechanical Turk Bill of Rights") behind the service. As a first step they have a released a Firefox plugin that aims to narrow the information assymetry between turks (those performing tasks) and requesters (those posting tasks). While requesters can see ratings for turks, requesters aren't rated: Turkopticon lets turks rate requesters. They need more turks to download and start using Turkopticon, so if you know any mechanical turks please enourage them do so."

This is a rebroadcast of the Friday Informatics Seminar hosted March 20, 2009 at 3:15pm in 6011 Donald Bren Hall

Speaker:
Paul Dourish
Professor, Department of Informatics
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. In particular, contemporary technologies -- including mobile devices and ambient displays -- can be imagined to provide opportunities for reflection on personal and collective action, or for monitoring and visualization of behaviour and its relationship to environmental change. These efforts exploit recent explorations of the use of computers as persuasive technologies in domains such as health and fitness.

In this talk, I want to examine the limits of this work as currently construed. In particular, I want to argue that the framing of environmental consciousness in terms of personal moral choice has three problems. First, it commits to a form of ecological utopianism whose internal contradictions make it a questionable basis for practical action; second, it implicitly adopts a model of ecological market capitalism that may be as much a source of problem as one of solutions, and, third, it systematically closes off areas of inquiry that reach beyond individual morality and consumption. By drawing on research on ecological politics and the political economy of environmentalism, I'll suggest some new directions for the relationship between sustainability and HCI.

HacketyHack

Commentary by Warren Applebaum

Hackety Hack a programming environment for the language ruby, meant for children. Its creator is the radical and outrageous professor [ok warren -ed.] who goes by the internet handle ”why the lucky stiff”. His goal is to enrich the lives of children and adults with programming and imagination; or perhaps to just draw cats. His other work; “why’s poignant guide to ruby” is one of the most unorthodox approaches to programming language study that I’ve ever encountered. He uses comic strips to denote the reader’s comprehension of each topic. His use of illustrations in comic book fashion allows him to explicitly depict the designs he is describing in ruby; as well as another of his creations, “shoes”, a GUI framework for ruby.

Children armed with Hackety Hack; coupled with some of the already available ubiquitous technologies, such as the iPhone presents a very optimistic outlook for the future of computing. Our children will already be programming the applications we learned how to implement in college, as tweens or even elementary school students. What kind of science fair projects are children going to be entering in the next decade? The impact of having these resources available for children at such a young age presents many concerns about developmental growth. The sacrifice of their other activities in order to program could possibly hinder their intellectual or emotional growth.

Congratulations to Joel Ossher on passing his advancement to candidacy exam!

Thesis: Automated Dependency Analysis for Internet-Scale Code Reuse

Committee:
Crista Lopes (Chair)
Jim Jones
Andre van der Hoek
Ian Harris
Jim Hicks

Software reuse by search-copy-paste-and-adapt has become a common practice in software development, along with other more traditional forms of reuse. Opportunities for this kind of reuse are plentiful, thanks in large part to the widespread adoption of open source processes and the availability of search engines for locating relevant code. Despite increased availability, merely locating an appropriate artifact to reuse is not sufficient. There remains the challenge of developing an understanding of its workings as well as integrating it into a project. This is made more difficult by the interconnected nature of complex software, as a single artifact may touch many different pieces of the system. This greatly complicates localizing usage examples and extracting reusable pieces from existing code. This paper presents a novel method of static dependency analysis to help support the understanding and integration of reusable code. Our dependency slicing algorithm automatically isolates self-contained slices from a source program, thereby dramatically reducing the amount of source code irrelevant to the artifact of interest. We describe how we modified Sourcerer, an infrastructure for internet-scale open source code search, to support an implementation of our dependency slicing algorithm. An empirical evaluation showed that the slicing algorithm introduced no compilation errors. Further, compared to the standard approach to dependency resolution, it reduced the number of files required by up to 300 times and decreased the number of declarations in these files by up to 4000 times.

Congratulations to Eric Baumer on successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis "Computational Metaphor Identification to Foster Critical Thinking and Creativity"

Committee:
Bill Tomlinson (Chair)
Lindsey Richland
Paul Dourish

The world's longest abstract (verging on becoming a "concrete")

Metaphor, the partial framing of a target concept in terms of a source concept, permeates human thought and action. Metaphors often manifest themselves as linguistic patterns in which language associated with a source concept is used to describe a target concept. Any given metaphor highlights some aspects of a concept while simultaneously downplaying others. Novel metaphors can provide creative reframings of familiar concepts by highlighting those aspects hidden by more common metaphors. However, due to their ubiquity, conceptual metaphors can be difficult to examine critically, if we can even notice them in the first place.

Photo courtesy of Wallflower83

Trust without touch: jumpstarting long-distance trust with initial social activities
by Jun Zheng, Elizabeth Veinott, Nathan Bos, Judith S. Olson, Gary M. Olson

Commentary by Latu Evelyn Fusimalohi

SUMMARY
This article explores what it means to “trust” both in the virtual world as well as the real world. Specifically, interactions through CMC, also known as “Computer-mediated communication”, as well as traditional in-person interactions, are tested against each other to show the effectiveness of meeting someone in person prior to interacting with them online, through online chatting or via email, as opposed to interacting without having ever face-to-face interactions. More trust exists when there have been a face-to-face establishment prior to interacting through the internet. Meeting in-person establishes 3 key aspects: “interactivity”, “visibility” and “social information”. All three aspects lead up to trust. In conclusion, the article shows that in order for CMC to be effective, there should be a face-to-face interaction prior to interacting online, thereby increasing the level of trust, resulting in a more comfortable social contact.

Congratulations to Judy Chen on passing her advancement to candidacy exam!

Thesis: rhythIMs: I Talk, Therefore IM

Committee:
Paul Dourish (Chair)
Gillian Hayes
Antoinette LaFarge
Don Patterson
Alex Taylor

rhythIMs is a visualization that presents patterns of instant messaging and physical presence. When we interact with others, much of our interaction is built around the convergence of each other's rhythms. Just as temporality is central to our experience of the world, it is also central to collaboration and our interactions with other people. By designing information visualization for use away from the desktop environment, I explore how technology can be used to support social presence, awareness and connectedness.

Congratulations to Yasser Ganjisffar on passing his advancement to candidacy exam!

Thesis: On Improving Search in Wikipedia

Committee:
Crista Lopes (Chair)
Faryar Jabbari
Ramesh Jain
Jim Jones
Don Patterson

Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia on the Web, is often seen as the most successful example of crowdsourcing. The encyclopedic knowledge it accumulated over the years is so large that one often uses search engines, to find information in it. In contrast to regular Web pages, Wikipedia is fairly structured, and articles are usually accompanied with history pages, categories and talk pages. The meta–data available in these pages can be analyzed to gain a better understanding of the content and quality of the articles. We analyze the quality of search results of the current major Web search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Live) in Wikipedia. We discuss how the rich meta–data available in wiki pages can be used to provide better search results in Wikipedia. Built on the studies on “Wisdom of Crowd” and the effectiveness of the knowledge collected by a large number of people, we investigate the effect of incorporating the extent of review of an article in the quality of rankings of the search results. The ex- tent of review is measured by the number of distinct editors contributed to the articles and is extracted by processing Wikipedia’s history pages. Our experimental results show that re–ranking search results of the three major Web search engines using the review feature improves quality of their rankings for Wikipedia–specific searches. We also compare the effectiveness of the proposed review–based ranking with PageRank based ranking.

Congratulations to Phoebe Lin on passing her Master's Thesis defense!

Thesis: Evaluating the Donor Experience in Development Work

Committee:
Don Patterson (Chair)
Susan Sim
Bill Tomlinson

Nomatic*Aid is designed to link donors, non-governmental relief/aid agencies and fieldworkers together into a communication network. It's a socio-technical system which leverage three technology components (a website, a database of managed aid projects and a mobile computing platform in the field) with organizational structures present in aid work. The primary goal of the system is to make the use of donated money more transparent to donors by using geo-tagging technique to identify donations and an email system to feedback donors.

Congratulations to Lilly Irani on passing her Advancement to Candidacy Exam!

Thesis: Seeing Practice in Second Life and Design Life

Committee:
Paul Dourish (Chair)
Gillian Hayes
Bonnie Nardi
Kavita Philip
Keith Murphy

This work presents two projects concerned with technological practices -- one of being a Second Life resident and one of being a technology designer. These projects see the cultures of Second Life and of design, like cultures more generally, as fluid, produced through everyday social interaction conditioned by history, contingency, and imagination.

Part I: Situated Practices of Seeing: Visual Practice in Second Life

Graphical virtual worlds are increasingly significant sites of collaborative interaction. Many argue that the simulation of the everyday environment makes them particularly effective for collaboration. Based on a study of visual practice in Second Life, I argue: first, that the practice of looking is more varied than it might at first seem; second, that we need to look beyond the virtual in understanding virtual worlds; and third, that implementations blend interactional practice. I detail basic tools for seeing in Second Life's virtual world client. I then describe the diversity of cultural practices of seeing the world and seeing audience that have emerged among users, with implications for sociality and self-presentation in a virtual world. I suggest that the value of virtual worlds as sites of collaboration might lie more in their richness and openness to appropriation and flexibilities of visual practice that engenders than in their simulation of everyday interaction. Visual practice helps to understand the particular, learned, and situated ways people come to see the world in this instance, a virtual one.

Congratulations to Silvia Lindtner on passing her advancement to candidacy exam in the General Track!

Cultivating Cool: Gaming, Networking & Leveling Up in Urban China

With the ubiquity of digital devices computer mediated gaming has become a pervasive aspect of our everyday lives in and between our homes and work, on streets, in malls and public transportation systems. Gaming practices have come to span across and relate a multitude of digital and physical sites that are embedded in larger webs of social connection and politics beyond just fun and leisure. This paper offers a new approach to debates of productive play and serious gaming that considers games in and of themselves a means for practical achievement in day-to-day management of social connection and socio-economic positioning. I present findings from two ethnographic studies that explored gaming sites in urban China where digital and physical scenes collided and became meaningful through the ways in which players positioned themselves and their gaming practices to socio-political narratives of a new and open China. In particular, I focus on two entertainment sites, wang ba (Internet cafe) and exclusive gaming clubs, and the role they played in the daily lives of their inhabitants to discuss implications for game design, and interaction design more broadly.

Committee:
Paul Dourish (chair)
Ken Anderson
Tom Boellstorff
Gillian Hayes
Kavita Philip

Congratulations to Leslie Liu who is this year’s recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Undergraduate Research for the School of ICS. Leslie will be honored at this weekend’s Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Leslie will be honored for her work in studying the usability and adoption of Personal Health Record websites. She has been leading this work for more than a year and recently submitted a paper to the AMIA conference.

A lot of other LUCI researchers will also be presenting this weekend, including Alex, Aurora, Gabi, Michael, and Sen. It should be great day!

Congratulations to Sharon and Don who recently had their paper on Nomatic*Viz accepted to ECSCW. This paper describes their deployment of the status visualization last year for several months. "Status On Display: A Field Trial of Nomatic*Viz "