Eszter

Looking for a summer [or insert appropriate season] hobby? Consider joining the Flickr Monthly Scavenger Hunt group!

Each month, you’re given a list of items for which you have to post photos. The challenge is made a bit easier by the fact that you can use photos taken at other times. (I think the really hard core version would not allow people to look in their archives, but it’s hard enough as is so it’s likely a reasonable rule.)

The July list has just been posted. It looks considerably harder than last month’s list, not that that was easy. I think for #8 “Hot pink” I can recycle my “Oink” entry from June. And probably few will have my particular take on #13 “Pest”. But what about entries like #11 “Most exotic animal for your location” or #14 “Road sign with wildlife on it”? This should be interesting…

No thanks to Jim Gibbon for siphoning off a few hours of my time today with that Gapminder pointer. Nonetheless, I wanted to send him a shoutout and welcome him to blogging seeing that he comes from a bit of Crooked Timber lineage. Kieran and I shared an office for a couple of years while in graduate school at Princeton. And it is in this same office that Jim now spends a good chunk of his graduate student days (granted, right now he’s doing summer research in Germany). Welcome to blogging, Jim!

To try to decipher what it is about 129 Wallace Hall that leads to all this blogging, you can check out a light switch, a chair component, a scooter, part of the wall, parts of the building and its door for clues on this collage – all the product of an afternoon when I didn’t feel like working on my dissertation. Those were the days… You think you have no time in grad school, but then you become faculty and all that blogging, taking pictures and surfing the Net… oh, never mind.

Via Jim Gibbon I’ve discovered Gapminder. Wow! It’s a wonderful visualization tool for data. The focus is on world development statistics from the UN. The tool is incredibly user-friendly and let’s you play around with what variables you want to see, what you want highlighted in color, whether you want to log the data, what year you want to display, and whether you want to animate the time progression (oh, and how quickly).

I’ve made an example available on YouTube. (I used Gapminder to create the visualization and Hypercam to capture it.)

Here is some context for that particular graph. My first interests in research on Internet and social inequality concerned the unequal global diffusion of the medium. I wrote my senior thesis in college on this topic and then pursued it further – and thankfully in a more sophisticated manner – in graduate school. So this is a topic that has been of interest to me for a while and it’s great to be able to play with some visual representations of the data.

So what you have on the video graph is a look at Internet diffusion by income (logged) from 1990-2004. I picked color coding by income category, which is somewhat superfluous given that the horizontal access already has that information, but I thought it added a little something. (For example, to summarize the puzzle of my 1999 paper – the first to run more than bivariate analyses on these data -, it focused on explaining why all the red dots are so widely dispersed on the graph despite all representing rich long-term democratic countries.)

Thanks to the tool’s flexibility, you can change it so that the color coding signifies geographical region and could then tell immediately that what continent you are on – an argument some people in the literature tried to make – has little to do with the level of Internet diffusion.

Imagine the possibilities of all this in, say, classroom presentations. Jim links to a great presentation using this tool. (Although I disagree with the presenter’s conclusion at the end about the leveling of differences regarding Internet diffusion.)

I recommend checking out the tool on your own for maximum appreciation of its capabilities.

UPDATE: There is more! Conrad – Jim’s source on this – tells me that the tool on the Trendalyzer site has even more option. Moreover, you can download a beta version of the software that even lets you import your own data.

The competition in the Anonymous Colleague contest was fierce with a very close outcome. The winner is Nabakov with the following entry:
“Mr Happy, who believes if something funny is worth saying once, it’s worth saying a thousand times, the fucker” having received 33.5% of the votes. He wins the free Anonymous Lawyer book from the publisher.

Congrats also – but no book, I’m afraid – to M. Gordon for the “Amazing Vanishing Advisor” entry, which came in close second with 30.2% of the votes.

There are more opportunities to have anon legal fun including the chance to win an Anonymous Lawyer T-shirt and the book. The Anonymous Law Firm is accepting job applications and the top ten entries get goodies.

As you may have noticed by now, I like maps. In fact, geography was the only elective I took in high school, two optional years in addition to the two required (no, I didn’t go to high school in the U.S. as you are likely able to guess from that info). Those classes included lots of material of less interest to me (e.g. leading mineral producers in the world and what shrubs grow in the tundra), but we also got to look at maps a lot, which was the main reason I was hooked.

*

Given these interests, I was excited to find Quikmaps this morning, a service that lets you annotate Google Maps, save them, go back and edit them, and in the meantime post them on your Web site. There have been other related services (GMapTrack comes to mind), but none have managed to do this as well as Quikmaps. I have been using Wikimapia for some map annotation purposes, but it’s not so good when the locations you are specifying have limited appeal. The one problem with such independent little upstarts is you never know how long they’ll be around (e.g. GMapTrack is nowhere to be found) so it’s not clear how much time and effort one should spend creating maps.

Nonetheless, if you want to explain to someone how to find you or want to annotate your favorite locations (or just restaurants) in town, this seems like a very helpful service.

UPDATE 11:30am CST: The site is down, but the “quikmaps guy” has posted a note on Digg to say he’s working on getting it back up asap. In the meantime, you can at least take a look at the homepage on duggmirror.

UPDATE 1pm CST: It’s working now here.
[thanks]

[*] I have purposefully avoided embedding a map here. I don’t want CT page loads to be too taxing on the Quikmaps site. It should be busy enough dealing with the digg effect .

Rob Capriccioso of Inside Higher Ed reports on what Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos and Jessica Coen of Gawker think about college students’ lack of interest in political blogs and Beltway gossip.

While I appreciate that they are happy with students spending their time on things other than politics, their responses ignore the fact that students do follow news, they just don’t do so on political blogs. All of the responses present time spent on these blogs as competition for time spent having fun with friends. However, findings from the survey suggest that students do follow current events (59% look up local or national news daily or weekly; 44% look up international news that frequently) so it’s not as though students only care about sex and beer. Granted, the survey doesn’t ask about the specific type of news they follow, but chances are that some of the material overlaps with topics covered on these blogs.

Additional info in the article includes my response to the inevitable question: “What about porn?”.

How does the popularity of Facebook compare to MySpace among a diverse group of college students? What types of blogs are students most likely to read? How many have ever visited Instapundit or Daily Kos?

As mentioned earlier, last month I gave a talk at the Beyond Broadcast conference hosted at Harvard Law School. The conference folks have now made the presentations available in both audio and video format. You can listen to or watch my talk misleadingly titled “Just a Pretty Face(book)? What College Students Actually Do Online”. (The title is misleading, because the talk is not about Facebook or even social-networking sites more generally speaking. Rather, it’s about what young people do online and how it differs by type of background.) I have put the presentation slides online in case you are curious to see the specifics (those are hard to follow on the video and there wasn’t enough time for me to mention stats in the presentation).

I should note that these are all still preliminary findings as I need to do more data cleaning and there’s tons more to do on the analysis front. But I don’t anticipate major changes in the findings presented given the size of the sample.

If you prefer text over these various other options I will be writing up the findings this summer and will post a link once it’s done. But if you can’t wait to find out the answers to the above questions then I recommend clicking on one of the above links. (All this information is toward the end of the presentation.)

Okay, fine, I won’t make it that difficult. The quick answers to the above questions are (again, for this group of college students):
1. Facebook is more popular (Facebook 78%, MySpace 51%)
2. Political blogs are the least popular type of blogs (from among the ones asked, which included personal journals, arts/culture/music, technology, sports)
3. 1% have ever visited each, Instapundit and Daily Kos that is (as per the third question above)

There’s lots more info in the presentation.

Recall that many of you took a survey back in January here on CT about your use of various sites and services. I haven’t forgotten that I still owe you a summary of the responses and that is forthcoming as I analyze the college student Internet use data. I thought reporting the former may be more interesting in the context of the latter thus the delay.

Thanks to all those who submitted entries in the Anonymous Lawyer contest. There are several funny submissions that merit being included in the final vote, but I thought more than five options would make it too cumbersome so I have limited the poll to five entries. Using input from Jeremy Blachman (the author of the Anonymous Lawyer book) the following entries are hereby declared finalists:

• The Double Mocha-Latte Drinking, Gel-Haired, Brown Courduroy Blazer Wearing Trendoid
• The Amazing Vanishing Advisor
• Prof-Who-Burnt-His-Beard-Off-With-That-Pretentious-Pipe
• The Apprentice Loser
• Mr Happy, who believes if something funny is worth saying once, it is worth saying a thousand times, the fucker.

Please vote for your favorite Anonymous Colleague description below the fold.

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With all this talk about fun books, it’s time for me to write a post about Jeremy Blachman’s new book Anonymous Lawyer. Better yet, I even have a copy to give away courtesy of the publisher, so this time I’m holding a contest with an actual prize. Yipee.

First, a few words about the book. (Disclosure: I was Jeremy’s TA for a class in college and have been in touch with him over the past few years.) It is in the format of a blog. (But no, uhm, you don’t start on the last page flipping backward.) The story is told through blog posts with email messages interspersed. If you have read the blog Anonymous Lawyer then you will be familiar with the topic and style, although rest assured that the book content is new and not simply a copy-paste of what is already available.

More about the book, a special book-related Web site and contest details below the fold.

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John has already mentioned that today is special for those who care about that sort of thing. (I’d link to his post if I wasn’t writing this on a somewhat malfunctioning Treo.) I was alerted to the special date by an email from a friend who let me know that he jumped in the shower at 6:06:06am. For those of us who aren’t ready to be doing anything at that hour (including notice the significance of the date and time) and who aren’t too strict about the specifics, another opportunity will arise at 6:06pm. What’s interesting enough for such an occasion? I will be on Broadway in NYC dropping off a friend at his show at 6pm. But so then what?

UPDATE: I’ve fixed the numerous typos in this post now that I have Web access again. I’ve also uploaded what I ended up doing at 6:06pm 6/6/06. In true photogeek fashion, I was just taking a picture.

A good book raises at least as many questions as it answers. By focusing on an issue that does not really get addressed by Yochai Benkler in the Wealth of Networks, I do not mean to suggest that the author should have written the book I would like to see written (in fact, I am working on it so it is just as well:). Rather, I would like to suggest some issues that are worth considering in the context of this discussion.

Before I present my comments, I would like to note that I very much enjoyed reading this book and think it will appeal to and be of value to a wide range of people. I like the mix of tackling large important questions while getting into the nitty-gritty of what is happening on the ground and illustrating points with very detailed and careful examples. The book serves as a helpful reference to various online discussions and events that have occurred in the past few years and it is useful to have them documented and linked together suggesting that they were more than isolated occurrences of how people are using digital technologies for political and social purposes. The other contributions of this seminar tackle the big questions addressed directly in the book. I have decided to address an aspect of the issue that is not addressed in detail yet I believe needs to be part of the conversation.

The point I want to focus on here is the unequal distribution of opportunities discussed in the book and what potential consequences this may have. That is, to what extent are the benefits of the possibilities raised by recent innovations distributed equally among different segments of the population and to the extent that they are not, what implications might that have?

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My brother just sent me this picture of my nephew:

My first reaction was that I laughed. The second was that I started coming up with possible captions for it (here’s one). It seems like a natural for a caption contest. I’m not holding a contest as I have nothing to give away, but I still invite you to suggest a caption, you know, just for the pure amusement, glory and fame associated with participation. As my brother kindly pointed out to me, my nephew is the one on the left, Pooh is on the right, fyi.

Recently I stayed at an intriguing hotel that is worth a mention: the 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. (I was unimpressed by the reservation part of the experience, but the stay made up for the annoyances incurred at that stage.)

Upon entrance, you almost have to step on the projection of two people sleeping in bed to get to the receptionists and/or the elevators to access your room. I wonder how many people who notice this just walk right across the image versus how many decide to walk around the picture. Big plastic red penguins are scattered across the building, not just in the designated museum section, but also in the hallways. I didn’t care for some of the installations (like the film about a woman and a man having a seemingly pleasant dinner judging from their facial expressions despite the fact that mice are walking all over their food), but some of it was neat (like the falling letters on a screen where the viewer becomes part of the image).

The hotel just opened this Spring. It’s a museum-hotel mix with various contemporary art pieces all over. The visit was much more fun than your usual hotel stay and it made me wish more hotels would put some interesting twist on the experience.

As the resident danceoholic I have to link to this video on the Evolution of Dance. It’s been viewed millions of times so I suspect it’s not new to all of you, but perhaps some of you haven’t seen it yet.

I’m not sure if I should be proud of, embarrassed, excited, or feel pathetic about the fact that of the approximately thirty songs featured in the clip, I have definitely danced to most at parties or clubs in the past (there were 3-4 that I don’t recall). To be sure, I certainly had not used most of the moves featured on the video. I’m more confident that that part is probably a good thing.

Watching the clip is a trip down memory lane as the various moments from life rush back when the particular songs were popular at parties and clubs. For example, Cotton-Eyed Joe by the Rednex will forever transport me back to the Arcade 46 bar and dance floor in the basement of our dorm in Geneva where I spent my junior year in college. Just imagine hundreds of people in this hole dancing away to this and other songs (Macarena anyone?). Those were the days…