Eszter

Following up on my earlier post about the difference in the marketing and subsequent sales of two similar books, here is a bit of an update. The current (Nov 30, 2006) issue of Nature has a review* of my father István Hargittai’s book The Martians of Science. Likely as a result, the book is now ranked #87,665 on Amazon.com and #33,109 on Amazon UK. Earlier today it was even higher (#56,649 in the US, #16,279 in the UK), but I didn’t have time to blog until now. This is a much better figure than over one million, which it was at some point recently. Of course, the change could well be due to no more than one or two purchases. I’m not sure why it is always higher on Amazon UK, perhaps Amazon lists fewer books on that site.

[*] Nature requires subscription. Here is a screenshot of the review.

As we know from recent CT discussions if not from our own inboxes, many people are not very good at communicating requests to strangers. My frustrations over this – being the recipient of such messages several times a week – have led me to write a piece on how best to approach a stranger with a request over email published today at Inside Higher Ed.

Often enough we are faced with a question that can best be answered by someone else, possibly a complete stranger. The upside of the Internet is that we can quickly contact folks without much effort. The downside of the Internet is that people can contact us without much effort. [..]

Given people’s limited amount of time, how can we ensure that our inquiring e-mail is not simply relegated to the recipient’s trash folder?

Summary:
Descriptive subject line
Polite point-of-contact
Succinct statement of the message’s purpose
Brief introduction of yourself
Acknowledging other attempts at finding an answer or solution
Restatement of question
Gratitude for assistance

.. all done briefly.

See the piece for details. Of course, one problem is that the people who are most likely to write pathetic notes are the least likely to read an article of this sort. But at least for those who care, perhaps this can offer some helpful pointers.

Here are some interesting video finds:

• Blind teenager “sees” thanks to clicking sound (amazing)
• Drums & piano compilation.. by someone who doesn’t play either instrument (that may not sound appealing, but it’s worth the click)
• A new way to multiply (not necessarily faster than one’s old way, but I still found it interesting)

Also, as proof that YouTube has grown up, I am now receiving spam through it:

Since the sender’s ID wasn’t created until five days before sending this note and the account has no bookmarked or submitted videos, it’s a safe bet (beyond the content of the message) that its sole function is to generate spam. (I have purposefully removed the URL the user is trying to advertise from the above image.)

.. or how to figure out whether you are hallucinating.

In the past few weeks I have come across more and more commentary about the site MyBlogLog, a service that is responsible for the list of pictures of other recent site visitors on the sidebar of some blogs (example).

But I was confused. I was quite sure that I had signed up for a free MyBlogLog account over a year ago, and this was not at all the service it had offered back then. I started searching and most recent commentary focuses on the above-mentioned social aspect of the service. So how to figure out if I am just utterly confused and mixing this up with another service?

[click to continue…]

I had lunch at the Googleplex yesterday and as a result got to add several geeky license plates to my photo collection. I wasn’t even trying hard to look for these, I was just glancing at the plates I passed walking to and from my car.

In unrelated geekiness, if you prefer to unleash your inner geek with the help of a bit more text then I recommend the quotes on this page. A couple of my favorites:

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)

[The BLINK tag in HTML] was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it! (Mark Andreessen)

If none of that made sense then you could go watch some Jay Leno Headlines where it is by design that many of the featured items don’t make sense.

Does anyone around here play Fantasy Congress? I’d heard about it before, but now that I was invited to join a league, I started looking into it in more depth.

As in other fantasy sports, you – the Citizen – draft a team of real-life legislators from the U.S. Congress and score points for your team’s successes.

However, as one commentator aptly notes: “[I]t’s lifelike: you win by getting bills passed, not by passing good bills.”

If you only care about winning the game, sure, you can compile a team of senators and represenatives who have an active record. But do you really want to be sitting around hoping that some real-life bill that makes your stomach turn is successful just so you can score some points in FC?

I can see the appeal to some extent, but overall I am not convinced the system is refined enough at this point to get me sufficiently enthusiastic. And while my first reaction was that at least it has educational value by teaching people about the legislative process, now I’m thinking that since it is most likely to appeal to folks who already know much about politics, it’s not clear that it will really spread the word far and wide about how the system works.

That said, I don’t have much experience with fantasy sports so I may be missing some important factors. Moreover, I do think the idea is interesting and certainly impressive that some college students thought it up and managed to execute it. And to be fair, it sounds like its creators – four undergraduate students at Claremont McKenna – are working on refining the system.

Three weeks ago I started a project: take at least one photo a day and post these online. Of course, anyone who’s been following my various posts about Flickr knows that this is not exactly a hardship. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to make a conscious effort every day to stop for a moment and notice something in my surroundings worthy of photography for one reason or another. Part of the point is to have a visual reminder of the various things I’m up to during the span of a year. It’s called Project 365 and I got the idea from Photojojo.

I let my contacts in Flickr know about this and several have joined in on the undertaking. I set up a Flickr Group where everyone can post their additions. (It does have some rules though so don’t just start dumping photos into the pool.) Some of us are also using tags that allow an easy look at how any one day is represented by different people.

Needless to say this is definitely in the realm of personal diary blogging, which is not something I had engaged in much before. But it’s fun with photos. Intrigued? Join us. Grab a free Flickr account or just post to your un-Flickred blog if you’re so inclined. Let me know, I have a Project 365 section on my personal blog‘s sidebar and would be happy to expand it. It is not a requirement to post a photo each day, that can be done in clusters of a few. The requirement is to take at least one photo each day and before midnight strikes, decide which photo represents something about the day.

I’m collecting examples of interesting ways in which people use various online services for their benefit. Of course, I can come up with lots of hypotheticals and examples from my own life, but it’s helpful to have concrete cases from the world at large.

Here, for example, is an interesting case of IT being put to use for the potential benefit of folks in a realm having little to do with IT. It’s about the use of Google Earth to back up claims about the value of some land that the government in India wants to acquire from farmers for limited compensation. The piece doesn’t say whether the use of these images ultimately led to a different outcome, but the potential is there.

Another relevant example is how people exploit spelling errors on ebay listings to get good deals. Because most people searching for those items don’t find them, there is much less of a bidding war and the final price is lower than would be otherwise. There are now even Web sites that help you exploit this, for example, eBooBoos does the guessing on your behalf. The results of a search on “turtle” yield items such as a turle neck sweater or a trutle box. (One wonders why ebay hasn’t worked on this issue in-house, but that’s another matter.)

I am looking for other examples concerning the beneficial uses of IT by average folks in particular, although interesting uses by super techies are welcomed as well. I’m not so much interested in (this time around) cases of xyz Web site helping to deal with other realms of IT uses (e.g. a handy tool for following blog posts), but uses that have a relatively direct impact on other realms of life as well. If you can share pointers to articles like the one above regarding the farmers in India that would be great. I also welcome stories from personal experiences. This is all related to some talks and papers I’m working on. Thanks!

Are you a teacher?
Yes.
What subject?
I am a sociologist.
Then you must be good at making friends.

Ooh, this is cool. You can view a tag cloud of the most common words in U.S. presidential speeches, declarations and letters since 1776. Slide the arrows on the bar to move from the representation of one document to another. The bottom of the page has a detailed description of how the tag clouds were generated, it looks like a careful approach. What a neat idea. [thanks]

While we’re linking to blogs that focus on the economic aspects of life, here is a plug for Credit Slips, a group blog focusing on “all things about credit and bankruptcy”. Not only does this blog have a great list of contributors, but they also bring in some star guests.

This week, Viviana Zelizer from Princeton’s Sociology Department has been guest blogging on topics ranging from the importance of personal ties in economic transactions to economic exchange across generations in families, the gendered aspects of spending and the intersection of economic transactions and intimate relations. (The latter is also the topic of her most recent book on The Purchase of Intimacy). She is great at talking about these issues so I highly recommend checking out her posts.

Full disclosure, Viviana was one of my mentors in graduate school. However, I think that makes me particularly qualified to comment on how helpful her work is in understanding questions about how social relations and cultural context influence economic processes. Be sure not to miss out on this treat.

In honor of Halloween, the staff at the Center gave each fellow a list of previous office occupants. (As a reminder, I’m spending the year at CASBS thanks to a grant from the Annenberg Foundation to bring communication scholars here.) Below is my list of ghosts from the past.

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Vivian’s recent comment wondering whether my work would interfere with my ability to post Friday time-sink amusements reminded me that I should not abandon my important role in keeping you from doing whatever it is that you had planned to do when you sat down at your computer.

This weekend’s amusement is brought to you by Jeux Chiants (yeah, I know, you’ll have to excuse my French).

Of the large selection, my highest recommendation goes to Double Jeu. You won’t miss much by not speaking French, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Just don’t let either ball drop. Hah, and doesn’t that sound easy? The one thing you’ll miss out on by not speaking French is the derogatory comments after you mess up. I managed to get up to 24.5 32.8 seconds. If anyone does it longer and understands the resulting comment, I’d be curious to hear if you ever get a true heartfelt congratulations.

I thought Labyflou was reasonably amusing and you can get it the first time around. It’s also not addictive, once is about enough.

Le jeu du ver is not bad. It’s one of those games that starts out almost too easy, but then gets significantly harder with each level.

Finally, La souris est invisible is a good reminder of how dependent we may or may not be on visual cues when using the mouse.

Click here for something cool.

in three minutes, the largest dot will travel around the circle once, the next largest dot will travel around the circle twice, the next largest dot three times, and so on.

the dots are arranged to trigger notes on a chromatic scale when they pass the line

[thanks]