Eszter

A propos election designs, check out Designs on the White House. Their goal is to generate great T-shirt designs for the Kerry campaign and then sell them to support the campaign. There will be some public voting and then voting by a list of judges (which for some curious reason does not include any Timberites;). They have sevaral themes: Best Pro-Kerry Shirt (positive spin, no mention of Bush), Best Anti-Bush Shirt (negative spin, must mention Bush), Best Issue Shirt – Domestic, Best Issue Shirt – Foreign, Funniest Shirt, Best Retro Shirt, Best Get Out The Vote Shirt and Most stylish. Be sure to check it out and also get those creative juices flowing and submit your own designs/quotes!!

I noticed the W has made it on to their list. Great minds think alike. (Hey, I can say that, it wasn’t my idea, it was a friend’s.) Oh, and for those interested in some W wearables immediately, here they are. I have added some circular Ws and some baby options in response to commentators’ requests.

UPDATE: As expected, others had thought of and implemented the W design a while ago. Take your pick: one, two, three, four. Thanks to a reader for pointing me to these sites.

Obviously there are tons of ways in which one can study memory and recall from the trivial to the immensely important. This morning I was wondering about a tiny corner of this area: how do people remember numbers, and in particular, phone numbers? I wish I had a better reason than the following for bothering with all this. I was woken up, for the nth time, by a phone call from a number that looked much like mine. What gives?

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We’ve discussed bumper stickers here before. A friend of mine recently said she’d like to find a sticker that is simply a W crossed out. I picture one of those country letter stickers, but with a strikethrough. By the way, no need to search aimlessly for your preferred fender decoration, there are services that allow you to make customized ones. I used one such service to create a Crooked Timber sticker:) and was happy with the outcome.

UPDATE: I couldn’t resist. Get your W oval bumper sticker, T-shirt, baseball cap and many other goodies here.

Some issues get a lot of play in the media while others go completely ignored. The UN has a site devoted to “10 Stories the world should hear more about”. Of course, one could probably compile an endless list of stories we shouldn’t be ignoring, but it’s certainly one place to start. You can read about child soldiers in Uganda, the role of women in negotiating piece and rebuilding societies (did you know that in Rwanda women hold 49% of seats in the legislature?), and the disappearance of some peoples and languages (did you know that there are languages out there spoken by less than 100 people?). These snapshots of stories are very short and the descriptions of the issues seem a bit simplistic at times, but it’s an interesting place to start for coverage of important topics that don’t seem to get much mass media attention. Alternatively, you can always head over to The Head Heeb who manages to cover a lot of issues from certain parts of the world that seem to go ignored by many. (Thanks to Neat New Stuff for the pointer to the UN site.)

Today, I will be attending a conference workshop in New York on Measuring Search Effectiveness: The User Perspective. I will be presenting some findings about What Makes an Expert Searcher? Evidence from User Studies. (That paper is not ready for distribution, but I will take this opportunity to link again:) to the paper that presents the coding scheme I used to analyze most of the data.) The workshop is being held in conjunction with WWW2004, the Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference.

I am reminded of my attendance at The 4th International World Wide Web Conference in Boston in 1995. I was a senior in college writing a thesis on the unequal international spread of the Internet. I went to this conference with the hopes of learning what research was being done about the social implications of the Internet. There were very few sessions on the program that were about any aspects other than technical. After one of the few sessions where panelists discussed some philosophical questions related to the Internet, I walked up to someone to ask whether they thought the government was doing anything about the Web. His response: “Yes, I think they have a Web page now.” This wasn’t exactly what I was getting at. I had hoped to see some sessions discussing policy implications. But this was still the era when many people thought the medium was somehow going to evolve in a vacuum, in isolation from existing social institutions.

Looking at this year’s program, it is clear that technical questions are still the overwhelming topic of this particular conference so perhaps it was a mistake to look for other types of content at WWW4. But this is easy to say today when the conference scene is littered with meetings discussing all aspects of IT. Back in 1995, there weren’t too many meetings you could go to where people would care to discuss any aspects of the Web.

I started blogging two years ago as an extension of/complement to my mailing list, which had been running since December, 2001. It’s funny that in that first post I describe blogging as “an online forum usually with one main author/contributor” and now here I am on a group blog. I did not see the benefits of the latter until I joined CT, which has been a delight, so thanks!

I wish I knew who were the first few dozen readers of “Eszter’s Blog” so I could express my appreciation to them. (Perhaps they are still with me in which case saying thank you here should work.:-) Those visits encouraged me to keep going and make this exciting and interesting – albeit at times quite frustrating – activity part of my daily routine. Writing blog entries has definitely pushed me to think about certain issues and ideas in the sort of detail that an occasional random thought would not require of me. It has also helped me meet some wonderful people. Thank you!

The debate I went to last weekend (Resolved: That John Kerry should replace George Bush in the White House) was quite interesting and had some especially good tid-bits. Here is one: The Negative suggested that at other times when the country was at war during the presidential elections the country stayed the course and it should do so this time around as well. The Affirmative responded that had people realized in 1864 that there was no slavery or had people noted in 1944 that there were no concentration camps then perhaps the results of the elections would have been different.

The Food and Drug Administration has rejected over-the-counter availability of the morning-after pill. As I have mentioned here before, easier access to such emergency contraception could reduce significantly the millions of unwanted pregnancies in the US. In case anyone is wondering whether the decision was political, consider the following:

The decision was an unusual repudiation of the lopsided recommendation of the agency’s own expert advisory panel, which voted 23 to 4 late last year that the drug should be sold over the counter and then, that same day, 27 to 0 that the drug could be safely sold as an over-the-counter medication.
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The “not approvable” letter was signed by acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Steven K. Galson, not by members of the FDA review team, as is usual. Former officials of the FDA said that generally means that the review team had made a different recommendation.

This is a more personal note although certainly related to topics discussed on CT and I’ll add some stats to give it some context. Congrats to my Mom for being elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences this week! The Academy has been around since 1825 and in all that time has had a total of eighteen women elected to its membership. The three women elected this week boosted the number up from fifteen. My Mom is only the second female chemist ever to become a member. The Academy altogether has no more than 200 members younger than 70 years old at any one time. (Members 70 or older do not count toward the 200 so there are just less than 300 current living members.)

Apparently the gender ratio is similarly abysmal in the science academies of other countries. Tabulations have shown that although in a few countries (e.g. Norway, Finland) the percentages are a bit higher around a whopping ten percent, among many other countries such as the UK, Germany, Israel, Denmark, France the figure is around four percent.[1] The state of things is especially striking given that nowadays women often make up more than fifty percent of those getting college degrees (although that’s distributed quite unevenly across fields). Sure, it takes time for people to go through the ranks, but a significant number of women have been getting degrees in science for a while yet the pipeline narrows for women at every step of the way from college degrees to graduate degrees to post-docs to assistant professorships to full professorships to membership in science academies.. all the way to the Nobel Prize.

fn1. Joan Mason: “Not much room at the top for women”, Forum, Journal of the Association for Women in Science and Engineering, No.8, Autumn/Winter, 1999/2000, p.3.

This is an eventful weekend. From a distance, I’m following the festivities surrounding Hungary’s EU membership. Locally, I’m taking part in the 125th anniversary celebrations of my School and look forward to the debate in a couple of hours by alum members of our dozen national championship winning Debate Team on “Resolved: That John Kerry should replace George Bush in the White House.”. (By School I mean the School of Communication, the University is older than that.)

John has already mentioned the significance of this day for the EU, but I had to comment myself given that in the CT crowd, I’m the one most immediately affected by this event. I remember back in the early nineties hearing that perhaps Hungary would join the EU by 2004 or 2005 and thinking that those years seemed so immensely distant they would never come. It is hard to believe that we are finally here.

I started writing a much longer more reflective post on all this, but I have decided to table that for another day. I am happy to remain in celebratory mood for the day and postpone some more critical comments for another time.

Those in Chicagoland should come join in on the School of Communication birthday events this weekend!

Via Liliputian Lilith (who realized this via many others among them weez) I noticed that today is Poem In Your Pocket Day, which bloggers are converting into a Poem On Your Blog Day. Although my high school literature teacher did everything in her power to make me hate poetry, I’m happy to say she didn’t succeed. So I share with you here one of my favorite poems, “I Cannot Know” by the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti.

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CT is filled with Google commentary these days, I can’t be left out!:) But since my fellow co-bloggers have provided plenty of interesting reading, I’ll just point to a clip. I used up ten minutes of my 15 yesterday in a live interview on CNNfn’s The Flip Side. Those of you who have been following my related posts and work won’t be surprised to learn that my comments had to do with seach skills and how commercial considerations may influence what people see online. It was a neat experience. And seeing www.Eszter.com splashed on CNNfn with me on the screen was pretty cool.:)

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There has been much hype about how the Internet and especially search engines (need I name the one in particular?;) are giving everyone everywhere access to anything and everything. I’ve already commented previously about why this simplifies matters (even beyond controlling for mere access issues), but let’s limit our discussion to people who are quite skilled at online information-seeking. What remains – or may increasingly become – hard to access?

Here are some examples. I’d be curious in what other instances people have encountered or perhaps expect to encounter roadblocks at some point.

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Ted’s recent post reminds me of a question I have been pondering recently due to a change in my media use habits. Where do you go first in the morning for an update on current events? I don’t necessarily mean just online, but in general? If online, what site(s) or lists? It used to be that I would just go to nytimes.com as a starting point and then take it from there often clicking on to some blogs (like some of the precursors of CT) to see what other items of news people found of interest. But starting with the New York Times doesn’t quite do it for me anymore. I haven’t developed a new system yet. For now, I often just start at whatever site I visited the night before. A friend of mine recently told me that he always starts at Talking Points Memo then he looks at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and finally checks out the BBC. That sounded like a good way to start the day. I’m curious, where do others go first?