Eszter

The other day I found myself in the curious position of having to prove that I had been on a flight in order to be allowed to return home. The only explanation I could come up with for the airline having no record of my presence on the flight there is that the gate agent had failed to scan in my boarding pass. As far as I can tell I had done everything “by the book”. In this day and age of being tracked in so many situations and so many ways, I found it an interesting twist that I could think of no way of proving (no way that the ticketing agent seemed to find satisfactory) that I had, indeed, been on the plane and should be allowed to return home on my originally scheduled flight. Details follow.

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I found it curious that in March of this year The New York Times mentioned the Web site BugMeNot.com in an article on sidestepping life’s little annoyances. Curiously, a new NYTimes article (scroll down to the bottom of the page) published this weekend repeats this recommendation.

For those not in the know, BugMeNot helps you find a username and password for sites that require registration. This means that you can proceed to viewing articles on, say, sites like nytimes.com without having to create an account for yourself on such sites.

Firefox users may be interested in this helpful extension that allows one-click use of BugMeNot. When you are on a page with a form for entering your username and password, place the cursor in the username or password box, right click on the mouse (or do the corresponding equivalent on a Mac) and you get a BugMeNot option in the menu. Select it and the form will be filled in automatically with registration information.

We have finalized our list of speakers for next year’s Technology and Social Behavior Colloquium Series at Northwestern. Bruno Latour will be our first visitor followed by other great researchers engaged in fascinating projects representing numerous academic disciplines (in order of their visits): Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford, Anne Holohan from Univ. Trento, Bob Kraut from CMU, David Mindell from MIT, Linda Jackson from Michigan State, Sarah Igo from UPenn and Batya Friedman from Univ. Washington.

You can sign up on our announcement list to receive reminders about these events.

Let’s see how geographically specific I can make my recommendations.:) (But hey, there are enough Chicagoland CT readers that this may be relevant.) I’ve been so preoccupied with looking up summer events in Chicago proper that I’ve missed things in my own backyard. (Well, technically it’s more in front of the building than behind it, but you get my point.:) This weekend – June 18-19 – is Custer’s Last Stand. I literally ran into the preparation yesterday as I went around the block for dinner. It looks like it will be fun. Then again, Jonathan noted in the comments to the other thread that these neighborhood street fairs can be somewhat disappointing. He suggested we check out the ones in our neighborhood. So this being 100 ft away sounds like a good target. It looks like there will be several other such events in Evanston this summer. Of course, if all else fails, there’s always the beach.

For those in Chicagoland or those contemplating a visit, here are some fun goings on over the summer. I still consider myself relatively new in the area so I’m still actively on the lookout for what goes on here these months. I’m very impressed.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve already had the opportunity to go see a Gospel Music Festival, an Art Fair and participate in other outdoor celebrations. Much more is ahead. The free Summer Dance program started at Grant Park this past Wednesday. It runs until the end of August. On Wednesdays they have a DJ. On Thu-Sun they first offer free dance lessons and then have a live band for dances ranging from Polka to Swing, from Bachata to Waltzes. Given that I have been spending increasing amounts of time in dance classes, this is an exciting and fun opportunity. A propos dance, this weekend is the annual Chicago Crystal Ball national dance competition. I’ll be there although only for part of it since I’m hosting friends over the weekend and we’ll be exploring numerous areas of town. No, I won’t be competing at Crystal Ball, but I’ll be cheering on friends who will.

Next weekend (24-26th) will be the Wired Nextfest for all of us interested in the latest gadgets. I think from there I’ll head straight to Grant Park for that evening’s ballroom session.

A bit later in the summer will be the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival also in Grant Park. This event it free as well. They will be wrapping up with Star Wars on Aug 23rd. Sounds fun.

I have found the following resources especially helpful in finding out about goings-on and keeping track. I recommend them as sources of additional amusement:

• City of Chicago Events page
• Upcoming.org‘s Events listings (this should be helpful also if you are in another metro area in the US)

I am constantly on the lookout for cool online tools. I just found one. I came upon it through del.icio.us, I think this set. One of these days I’ll get around to posting about what a cool tool that is in its own right.

But right now I want to tell you about YubNub. As its creator Jon Aquino explains, it is “a command-line for the web”. Impressively, it was his submission for a 24-hour programming contest.

What does it do? It helps you access search results on various sites directly. That is, say you want to search for a book on Amazon. As long as a command has already been created for searching on Amazon, you can simply enter the following in YubNub:
amazon booktitle
and you will be redirected to Amazon’s search results for “booktitle”. Or let’s say you want to search for an address on Google Maps, you can just enter:
gmaps address
and YubNub redirects you to the Google Maps result.

What is additionally great about YubNub is that if a command does not yet exist for your preferred search, you can add it.

To try it out, I created a command for searching the archives of Crooked Timber. If you go to YubNub and start your search query by typing in ct and then proceeding with whatever terms are of interest then you will be redirected to the results of your search here on CT.

So now you may be thinking: Well, that’s nice, but why would I bother going to yubnub.org to run the query instead of just going directly to the site where I want to run my search? Because you don’t have to go to yubnub.org. Several people have written Firefox search plugins for YubNub. So assuming you use Firefox and have a search toolbar in your Firefox browser, you can just add this as an additional engine.[1] MOREOVER, because YubNub defaults to Google when you do not enter a specific command, you can just leave YubNub as the default engine in your toolbar and still use Google (assuming that’s of interest) for generic searches without commands.

The service is evolving. Its creator has some suggestions and it sounds like he continues to work on it. Unfortunately, there is no way to make corrections to typos in submitted command lines so for now that has to be handled through emails. It is also easy to see how some people may create numerous commands that are not very interesting to most people. But overall, it’s a great service, I recommend trying it out!

UPDATE: For those of you savvy Firefox users who are wondering how this adds to already existing features in Firefox I should mention Jon Aquino’s inspiration for creating this service: not having to replicate the same keywords on different machines. For those of us who use more than one machine this is very helpful. Thanks to YubNub, it’s enough to add it to the toolbar and you’re ready to go.

1. Far be it from me to assume that you do use Firefox. But this would be a good time to start.

• Transparent screens [I don’t remember how I found this one, probably on del.icio.us somewhere]
• Human tetris [mpg] [thanks]

:-)

It may be a bit geeky of me to admit this, but I find the following quite fun/funny. A Peanuts and Charles Schulz enthusiast figured out how the book images are generated on Amazon’s Web site. He has documented it in detail so now we can all create our own images. (It looks like he’s not the first one to play with this, but his discussion of the various options seems more comprehensive than others’ so it’s worth a pointer.) I thought I’d display one of my favorite cartoons with a twist. Enjoy! (Or be amused that some of us do.:) [thanks]

As per Nat Gertler’s ethical considerations listed on the right side of the page linked above, I would like to note that the discount percentages in the image above are being used in a purely decorative fashion and do not reflect any offers on Amazon’s site.

This weekend I’ll be at the annual meetings of the International Communication Association meetings in New York. All of the members from my research group will be participating in the conference and we’ll be reporting on several of our projects. Sunday midday we will present a poster summarizing some preliminary findings from our project on cross-ideological conversations among bloggers. I thought I would give a little preview here.

Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com talks about the potential for IT to fragment citizens’ political discussions into isolated conversations. Borrowing from Negroponte, he discusses the potential for people to construct a “Daily Me” of news readings that excludes opposing perspectives. Sunstein argues that for democracy to flourish, it is important that people continue to have conversations with those in disagreement with their positions. However, he is concerned that with the help of filtering out unwanted content people will fragment into enclaves and won’t be exposed to opinions that challenge their positions. The book is an interesting read, but it does not offer any systematic empirical evidence of the claims.

I have been working on a project this past year with Jason Gallo and Sean Zehnder on empirically testing Sunstein’s thesis. We are doing so by analyzing cross-linkages among liberal and political blogs. You may recall that about two months ago Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance came out with a report on “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election”. My first reaction was one of panic. Here we had been working on our project for months and someone else came out with the results first. However, a closer read made me realize that our project has some unique elements. And if nothing else, seeing that project has made us more careful and critical in our work showing that more research in an area can be fruitful, because hopefully it inspires the agenda to move forward in a productive manner.

[I updated this image on June 1 when I realized the right graph wasn’t displaying exactly what I had described it as.]

Our work has focused on addressing two questions. First, we are interested in seeing the extent to which liberal and conservative bloggers interlink. Second, we want to see what kind of changes we may be able to observe over time. Sunstein’s thesis suggests that we would see very little if any cross-linking among liberal and conservative blogs and the cross-linking would diminish over time. We go about answering these questions using multiple methodologies. We counted links and calculated some measures to see how insular the conversations are within groups of blogs. We also did a content analysis of some of the posts in our sample. We continue to work on this project so these are just preliminary findings.
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Learn the ways of the farm with the help of Ham Solo, Chewbroccoli, C3Peanuts, Tofu D2, Obi Wan Cannoli, Cuke Skywalker, Lord Tader and Princess Lettuce. [thanks]

I didn’t write this post.

Google arrives at Yahoo! 1999.

[Image extracted from the Web Archive.]

For something that’s been around for so long (personalized portal pages) My Google isn’t offering much at this point. But how interesting that they have picked sites like Slashdot as one of only a dozen options to feature for now. I would like to see the behind-the-scenes of what led to these twelve particular items being featured. Some are quite obvious (e.g. redirection to Google movie searches or Google Maps), but others probably have to do with deals. Gosh, all this reminds me of my article in 2000 on the role of portals in channeling user attention online. I discuss the implications of the underlying commercial decisions in this piece.

Some physicists have come out with a paper on the Eurovision song contest. Of course, we at CT like to be ahead of the curve and thanks to Kieran’s ingenuity reported similar findings over a year ago. So much for this being “new research”.

There has been much excitement about and focus on social networks in the past few years ranging from social networking sites to several high-profile books on the topic.

Interestingly, much of the buzz about recent work covers research by physicists. It’s curious how physicists have expanded their research agenda to cover social phenomena. I thought their realm was the physical world. Of course, since social phenomena are extremely complex to study, as a social scientist, I certainly welcome the extra efforts put into this field of inquiry.

What is less welcomed is watching people reinvent the wheel. Sure, partly it’s an ego thing. But more importantly, it’s unfortunate if the overall goal is scientific progress. Much of the recent work in this area by physicists has completely ignored decades worth of work by social scientists. If we really do live in such a networked world where information is so easy to access, how have these researchers managed to miss all the existing relevant scholarship? Recently Kieran pointed me to an informative graph published by Lin Freeman in his recent book on The Development of Social Network Analysis:

People whose overall work focuses on social networks are represented by white dots, physicists by black ones, others by grey circles. As is clear on the image, the worlds exist in isolation from each other. It would be interesting to see year-of-publication attached to the nodes to see the progression of work.

I have been meaning to write about all of this for a while, but John Scott from the Univ. Essex addressed these issues quite well in some notes he sent to INSNA‘s SOCNET mailing list a few months ago so I will just reproduce those here. (I do so with permission.)

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Yesterday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released its latest research report, this one on health information-seeking online. The study finds that 80% of users have searched for some type of health information online (it’s worth noting here that “health information” is defined broadly by including searches for diet and exercise or fitness in this category). Regarding material pertaining to a specific disease or medical problem, the survey of 537 users found that two-thirds have used the Internet as a resource.

One of the topics of interest to me in my research is seeing how different types of Internet access may result in different types of Web uses. The report shows that while 87% of those with a broadband connection at home sought some health information online, only 72% of those with a home dial-up connection did so as well. Also, Internet veterans (in this case people who’ve been online for six or more years) are considerably more likely to have engaged in such activity (86%) than those who have 2-3 years of online experience (66%).

Of course, we would need more information about all these users to draw any conclusions regarding the independent effects of certain factors. People who went online later and who don’t have high-speed connections at home may differ from others in various ways (e.g. lower income, lower education), which may then be related to their propensity to search for health information in the first place. Nonetheless, these relationships are interesting to observe. They support my arguments about the potential implications of connectivity quality and experience for types of uses.

The author of the report is Susannah Fox, Pew’s resident expert on the topic. She has been working in this area for several years and has put out other related reports in the past, e.g. one dealing with prescription drugs online and another looking at how users decide whether to trust online information when it comes to health matters.