Peru pics
Pictures from the Inca Trail, Nazca, Paracas, and Lima are up on Flickr.Italy photos
Pictures from Florence and Cinque Terre are up on Flickr. Highlights of the trip included a restaurant owner professing his love for me (and me pondering a lifetime of his scrumptious tagliatelle), funky vintage jewelry shopping on the other side of the river, and hiking and dishing about relationships with friends on the trail between the villages between Cinque Terre. And walnuts.
Primary fever
I ran into my upstairs neighbor at the polls today. Coming from Oregon, I'm used to mailing in a ballot, and have generally been annoyed that Pennsylvania requires you to come to a physical station to cast a ballot. However, seeing Charlie at the community center gave me this nice, civic-responsibility feeling. It felt pleasantly homey and old-fashioned, like we should be talking about quilting or tractors.That pleasant feeling was only slightly mitigated by the twenty voters from the nearby retirement center ahead of me in line. In the meantime, I had a nice conversation with a friendly Republican. We lamented that our favorites were no longer in the contest (Giuliani, Kucinich).
Polls close in a half hour. Go Obama!
Off to CHI
This year I'm showing a couple of work-in-progress posters at CHI, as well as participating in a workshop on HCI for emergencies. Irina Shklovski and I will be presenting our results of a two-year ethnography of New Orleans musicians after Katrina, looking at ways they adopted and adapted technology over the long term. The posters are more in my typical area, looking at behavior in online communities.Taking up the mop (Poster PDF, Article PDF) reveals behaviors of Wikipedia editors that make them likely to be promoted to administrator status. There had been plenty of discussion during Requests for Adminship saying that sheer number of edits shouldn't matter, but this study makes it clearer. Edit count doesn't matter, and even writing on article talk pages doesn't help much. Instead, diversity of experience and policymaking is far more valuable to those choosing admins. The model can be used as an "admin finder" to identify editors likely to pass consensus, as a self-evaluation tool for editors considering nomination, or as a voter dashboard during the Requests for Adminship processes.
Mind your P's and Q's (Poster PDF, Article PDF) looks at the effectiveness of politeness (or rudeness) at getting a reply in many kinds of online discussion groups. We found that polite language tripled reply counts in some health support groups, but rudeness was far more effective in others.
If you'll be at CHI, email or text me.
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Orwellian iphone
My cell phone was run over by a bus on Fifth last week, and as the cost to replace the crappy phone was about the same as the cost of defaulting on my Verizon plan, I decided it was an omen that I should get an iPhone.Initial thoughts: I love it. Flipping it sideways to see coverflow while listening to music, hearing the music attenuate when a call comes in, touching a phone number on a web page and having the option to call it: ingenious interface ideas.
Some funny downsides: The keyboard imposes Orwellian simplicity on my emails. No elaborate thoughts containing Buffy-esque neologisms not in the autocorrection dictionary. Little punctuation, since that requires switching modes. And while it adds apostrophes in many contractions, it can't tell the difference between "its" and "it's" and thus makes me look a little stupid. Apple, could you work on a grammar module that's smarter than Word's?
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I've just stopped worrying about the difference between we're and were in my messages though they are quite different.
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But there's one problem with the Obama argument: what's he offering instead? vague xenophobia (and it's friedman, not obama who's saying that)? He's notably silent recently on what he's actually going to do. He actually proposed legislation for and supports subsidizing coal gasification of all things - which would not only be 2-3 times worse in terms of carbon load but has the side benefit of pleasing his big coal financiers in Illinois. Granted the environmentalists jumped down his throat for it (rightfully) and he's since backed off from promoting it, but is that really the best idea he has?
If we were actually a nation with a backbone, we'd slap on a $3 per gallon tax on gas like most of europe does and drive less. But seeing as we've developed our national infrastructure directly counter that line of thinking, it would be political suicide to do just that. Instead we get candidates endorsing ethanol (strangely McCain's the only one with the right idea there) and offering vague ideas about some ideal world where we're no longer dependant on oil.
I'll be impressed when a candidate puts together a comprehensive energy/transportation policy plan that emphasizes nuclear (fusion and fission) and renewables combined with mass transit and electrification of personal transit. Till then, I'm not buying anyone's slanted opinions.