Eszter

Some things I only post on my own blog thinking that they probably have limited appeal. However, now that this has been picked up by several others I’m thinking that perhaps it’s worth a CT mention.

Frappr uses Google Maps to present the locations of people who share some type of affiliation. Frappr maps can have whatever theme you choose. I created one for Crooked Timber readers. You can add your own location (with or without photo plus a short message). Despite what it may seem like at first, non-U.S. locations are supported as well.

So far I’m the only one on the map. I’m heading to bed now. It would be cool to have the map populated with all sorts of CT readers (and writers:) by the time I wake up.

UPDATE: Thanks for the many additions, keep on pushing those pins onto the map! A few logistical notes: If you’re not in the US then be sure to click on “Not in the US? Click Here” below the “Zipcode” field. You will then have to enter both city and country. (And yes, it does hte curious thing of assuming that your city is in a county with the same name even if it isn’t (e.g. Budapest, Budapest, Hungary), but so it is.) Although it looks like you are required to leave a Shoutout, try leaving some spaces or a hyphen if you’re not inspired to leave a message. That should work.

[thanks]

I’m running around all day today, but no time to wait with this post: I want to recommend Lifetime’s Human Trafficking mini-series. It aired last night (in the U.S.), but the first part will be replayed early this evening before the second part is shown.

The NYTimes quotes an immigration and customs official from the movie:

An ounce of cocaine, wholesale: $1,200, but you can only sell it once. A woman or a child, $50 to $1,000, but you can sell them each day, every day, over and over and over again. The markup is immeasurable.

The movie is well done in many ways, I recommend it.

One question I’m left with is the best ways to educate people, and especially children, about all this. A movie like this is helpful, but it’s not clear how a 12-year-old would deal with it. And then there are areas where showing such a movie is not even an option.

The NYTimes piece has a synopsis of the first part in case you can’t spend four hours on this tonight.

For your weekend reading pleasure, my Internet & Society course blog links to 25 students’ class blogs. They are required to blog about their readings (which already leads to some interesting posts), but additionally, several of them have gotten inspired to blog about class-related (and sometimes unrelated) topics above and beyond the required assignments. From interviewing grandparents about their radio uses to reflecting about their obsessions with IT they have covered lots of topics.

Extras have included discussions of the “What Would Jesus Blog” movement, the Facebook banned at a university, Tuvalu’s .tv domain name (also discussed briefly in class once) and frustrations with software installation. One student blogged about a run-in with someone regarding a copied identity on MySpace. Blogger ELVIAJERO has a series on Weekly Musical Leanings. Another student blogged about an upcoming movie that a friend is producing. Some students also get inspired to add images to their posts, which adds a fun component when you’re reading through a couple dozen of these blogs. (And yes, they are careful about not hotlinking and using up others’ bandwidth.)

In case you’re wondering about the curious blog names, I encourage students to blog without their real names for privacy (and in compliance with FERPA guidelines).

I’m sure they’d be delighted to get some comments from people outside of class so if you have a moment please stop by and say hello. That said, many of the comments on the posts are closed due to spam protection we have implemented on their blogs. We use both the auto-close comments plugin for WordPress and an additional spam guard to protect against unwanted junk. I recommend both if you’re a WordPress user.

I saw a great concert last night as part of the Third Coast International Audio Festival‘s events. The special guest for the evening was One Ring Zero playing music different from most of what’s usually on my playlist. As one of the members described it at some point: weird circus klezmer music. As silly or weird as that may sound, I think it was a reasonable description of at least some of their music. (If you don’t know what klezmer music is, you can check out the bit of discussion we had about the topic here on CT a while back or see what Wikipedia has to say about it.)

The group was performing pieces from their most recent album As Smart As We Are that has songs with lyrics from an impressive set of writers. See the Web site for some sample mp3s and the list of contributors to this album.

The concert also came with the special treat of watching Bob Ewards play the theremin. I had never seen a theremin played so this was interesting in general. In case you don’t know what a theremin looks like (or what someone looks like playing it), Theremin.info has a helpful animated image on its front page to give you an idea. (Needless to say blogs exist on the topic of theremins if you want a daily dose.:)

Thanks to my friend Ben – the trumpet player in last night’s performance – for alerting me to this event, it was definitely a treat. I’ve posted a couple of images on Flickr.

Do you like to play sudoku? Do you prefer images over numbers? You may for this game. Picture sudoku lets you choose images from photo-sharing site Flickr with which to fill your sudoku puzzle. You can specify the tag and/or the user whose images you want to integrate into the game.

Examples:
Chicagoland sudoku (with just my photos)
turtle sudoku (with everyone’s photos)
long-shadow sudoku (with everyone’s photos)
chocolate sudoku (with everyone’s photos)

As you can see, the possibilities are endless.

The game also gives you a “blank” with which to erase placement of photos. If you are intrigued by a picture and want to see it in full size on Flickr then just click on the asterisk next to its name in the left-hand column.

Have fun!

[thanks]

It’s been too long since we’ve had some geeky goodness around here. But wait! You don’t have to be a geek to appreciate and benefit from the following so read on regardless of your geek quotient.

I’ve been a big fan of Firefox since last Fall and given its wonderful features (better security [update: see comments for suggestions as to why this may not be the case], all sorts of functionality) I try to do my best to encourage others to use it as well.

In that vein, I have put together a page with a list of my favorite extensions. Firefox extensions are little programs that add features to the browser. Some of my favorites include being able to search for a street address without having to retype the address or pull up a map first, tabbed browsing, better use of browser space, etc. I know some of these features are available in other programs as well, but it’s great to have it all come together so nicely in one program. Feel free to list additional favorites in the comments to this post.

I have also put together a detailed tutorial on how to install the program (on Windows) for those who do not feel comfortable downloading programs. Feel free to pass along these page to your parents, cousins, friends, etc.

This Webuse.Info site contains some additional information so to recap:

• Installing Firefox (on Windows)
• Some basics of efficient Firefox use
• Adding Firefox extensions
• Tips for efficient online searching

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Since the comments have gone in all sorts of directions, I have highlighted in green sections of posts that refer to additional extensions for those who want quick access to that info.

I am so glad that somebody finally wrote this piece regarding press fascination with iEverything. (The author does acknowledge Slate’s history with Microsoft.) The article also links to this great spoof ad, which summarizes much of the point quite well.

There is absolutely no need to educate me about the merits of Mac products. I used to and still do own several. That’s not the point here, which you’ll understand if you read the article for what it is.

I must’ve taken an alternate route on the evolutionary path since I still hate beer for the most part. Regardless, I did enjoy watching this Guiness ad. [link to .mov file] You can read a bit about the video creation process here.

UPDATE: Oops, sorry, this is a CT dupe! I knew I had seen “Noitulove” somewhere recently.:) When I saw Kieran’s post I was on a machine that couldn’t deal with a .mov file so I never clicked through and by now it’s off the front page. (As has been noted we’ve been quite busy around here recently. And as has not been noted – because I have been too busy to note – I’m too overwhelmed with deadlines right now to spend much time on CT these days. I shouldn’t have broken my vow to stay away for a few more days. Oh well, at least I made CT history.:)

In case anyone else missed it the first time around, I recommend clicking through now.:-)

Shana Tova!

Inspired by this post on Digg, I started running searches on Google to see what would yield a really high number of results. A search on “www” yields results “of about 9,160,000,000”. This is curious given that according to Google’s homepage, the engine is “Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages”. Perhaps they are extrapolating to sites that they are not searching. Or perhaps those “of about” figures are not very accurate. In general, those numbers are hard to verify since Google won’t display more than 1000 results to any query. The figures may be helpful in establishing relative popularity, although it’s unclear whether the system can be trusted to be reliable even to that extent.

ABC’s Dancing with the Stars Dance-off is on right now live. I should’ve blogged about this earlier, but I didn’t realize it until an hour ago. It’s exciting to see a fairly marginal activity that you are passionate about attract widespread attention and enthusiasm. The show ran in the summer and already named a winner. But enough people were disgruntled about the results that they are having a rematch.

I have been a huge fan of ballroom and Latin dancing ever since senior year in high school when I joined a club and attended classes regularly. After thirteen years away from the sport, I found my way back to it this past January. I am incredibly passionate about it and was happy to find a great club in Chicago. I get to take classes with super-talented dancers/teachers Tommye Giacchino and Gregory Day (the club owners) who are U.S. and Blackpool Champions. It’s a blast and also very good exercise. I even considered competing, but decided that that level of commitment wouldn’t be conducive to tenure.

I find it problematic that the Dancing with the Stars show has participants competing with each other doing different dances. Some dances are much harder than others so it doesn’t make sense to compare them. For example, Cha-Cha and Quickstep are sufficiently different that a comparison is nearly impossible. Granted, you can do super hard moves in all of them. To someone who takes this seriously – like moi – the dancers are not always great (some are better than others), but it is clear that they put a lot of effort into it and are taking it seriously. To be sure, you do need more than a few weeks of training to do this well.

Tonight’s winner will depend completely on audience feedback. ABC is making a donation to the charity of the winner’s choice so that’s an incentive to participate even if you’re not interested in dancing.

PS. If anyone knows of good clubs in the Stanford area, I am curious to hear as I would like to continue doing this when I’m out there next year.

PPS. If any Chicagoland readers are inspired to take lessons, feel free to contact me for more info about Chicago Dance. And if you decide to join, let’s use the referral discount special.:)

Next year we’ll be adding a time zone to CT representation. I will be a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. I am super excited about this opportunity. The Center got a grant from the Annenberg Foundation last year to add Communications to the fields represented among its fellows and I’m going as part of such a cohort.

There’s something amusing related to all this. Or I thought it was amusing until I shared it with a friend who didn’t think it funny at all. You be the judge. While I was lifehacking away a few weeks ago, Chris pointed me to Google Sets for various associations. I decided to see what Google Sets had to say about my academic affiliations. I typed in the names of my BA and PhD granting institutions plus Northwestern (the place of my current employment) and pressed Large Sets. The fourth school on the list was Stanford. When I did this I already knew that I was headed to the Center next year so I found this amusing. But perhaps you need to have a certain geek factor to get anything out of this exercise.:)

This Friday and Saturday I had the pleasure of spending some face-to-face time with a group of bloggers several of whom will be familiar to the CT crowd (click on the photo for details). Dan Drezner and our very own Henry Farrell organized a great meeting on The Power and Political Science of Blogs. Ethan Zuckerman kindly took copious notes and has posted some of them on his blog.

Congrats to Dan and Henry for hosting a very interesting and productive meeting. The conference featured some of the best discussions I’ve heard and participated in on the subject of blogging. I think we are all invigorated and inspired now to go and finish writing up our related papers.:)

A serious problem with content filters – whether add-on software or the “safe” search mode of systems – is that they often block legitimate content that should not be filtered out. These false positives can include important information that most would have a hard time defending as harmful. Paul Resnick and colleagues have done some interesting work on this regarding filtered health information.

Now comes to us a helpful little tool (found through ResearchBuzz) that lets you run searches to see what content is blocked in the safe-search modes of Google and Yahoo!. Type in a search term and see what sites would be excluded from the results when running the safe mode on the two engines.

Curiously, Google blocks the TheBreastCancerSite.com when you turn to safe mode for a search on “breast cancer” while Yahoo! doesn’t. (The Breast Cancer Site does not seem to have objectionable material, its noted mission is to raise funds for free mammograms.)

By the way, Google’s and Yahoo!’s results can be quite different regardless of what gets filtered. Dogpile has a nifty little tool that visualizes some of the differences. I discussed it here while guest-blogging over at Lifehacker a few weeks ago.