Musing

Lately I have been listening to the Sound Opinions podcast (thanks Jenna!). This has helped me get excited about music again. Jim & Greg, who host the show, help remind me of music that I used to like a lot but I had forgotten to listen to in a while or they introduce me to new music that I really enjoy or might have never listened to if it weren’t for their suggestion. I like the show because they listen very widely. Given the format of the show and the fact that people who like music usually like to be snobby about it, you might think that they only listen to obscure indie rock or something of the sort but they also listen to hip-hop, pop, etc. They appreciate good music within each genre for what it is and are also knowledgeable about the history of rock and other genres. One of my favorite pieces that they did traced the song “In the Pines” using recordings from The Essential Bill Monroe & the Monroe Brothers’ recording in 1930 to Kurt Cobain’s performance at MTV unplugged in New York in 1994. Pretty amazing stuff. http://www.soundopinions.org/.

I’m also excited because I bought the Zune pass so this month I am downloading ALL the music that they suggest and listening very broadly. If I don’t like something I’ll just delete it or it will expire soon.

To listen to the original “In the Pines”: In the Pines

I don’t think Seattlites should be overly concerned with dealing with the heat. However, it has gotten a bit hotter and lately I have felt this “heat wave” has impacted my running. I have felt more sluggish and just all over a bit weighed down. I found this article http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/health/nutrition/03Best.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1 in the NY times very interesting since it has some useful tips on how to avoid overheating while exercising. One thing that I have noticed that this article explains a bit better is that it is much better to run in the morning than in the evening. I didn’t know exactly why but apparently the mornings are colder but have higher humidity levels. This article points out that humidity levels aren’t as important as water vapor pressure and water vapor pressure is actually lower in the morning when the air is cooler. Point here is, run in the morning, it’s much easier. My problem is that with my schedule lately, I’ve been running in the afternoon. I hope that with the long weekend coming up I will be able to take some time to go on a few nice long morning runs.

Also, props to WordPress for their latest features. I feel like the site is continually improving and I particularly like the visualizations of my blog’s (meager) traffic.

Check out Slashdot today to read an article that discusses David Evan’s work in depth and also references the profiles work that Scott Counts and I have been working on at MSR. Here’s the link to the article that made the front page of Slashdot: http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/do-youjustgetme.html. This references recent work that we presented at the ICWSM conference. Here’s a link to our actual article. Some of the main take-aways here are that people were able to make meaningful judgements after only a “thin slice” (5 attributes) of a Facebook profile. In fact, participants’ ratings of profiles after just five profiles were significantly correlated with ratings after the full profiles. Additionally, raters agreed with one another about which profiles they liked and didn’t like after just five profile attributes. Here are links to the papers since right now the links from my site are broken. Thanks for pointing this out!

http://research.microsoft.com/~counts/pubs/ICWSM_SpontInf.pdf,

http://research.microsoft.com/~counts/pubs/ICWSM_ThinSlices.pdf

This morning I heard Salman Rusdhie interviewed on KUOW and I must say that I am very excited to read his latest work; The Enchantress of Florence.  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90851280.

While I like many of Rushdie’s books, I don’t love all of them but this sounds very personally interesting to me.  I like the idea of blending historical details from the East and West that occur in parallel.  Rushdie spoke about the Mughal empire occuring at the same time that the Renaissance in Europe took place. I really wasn’t aware that these two cultural periods of enlightenment and culture existed simultaneously. In fact, I always that that the Mughal empire pre-dated the Renaissance.

Rushdie also spoke about the Emperor Akhbar.  I very much hope that he writes about him in this book because he is a character who also interests me.  For an airy portrayal of Akhbar’s (a Muslim) romance with a Hindu princess Jodhaa, I would recommend the not-so-historically-accurate film Jodhaa Akhbar.  http://www.jodhaaakbar.com/ If nothing else the film is visually stunning. Another older film is Mughal-e-Azam.  This is one of the first Bollywood films to have color (for the dance scene of course).

Rushdie points out that Akhbar was really far ahead of his time and a modern man who had to break with tradition in many ways to achieve greatness.  I am interested in these parts of his character and from what I understand he united much of India and the Rajput kings.  Although Rushdie spoke today at Town Hall, I was unable to attend since I was feeling sick plus I have to get ready for graduation guests.

CHI talks are online so if you weren’t able to make it all the way to Florence, then check out interesting talks at http://www.videolectures.net.  One talk worth highlighting is by David Kieras who spoke about the psychology of human computer interaction:http://videolectures.net/chi08_kieras_phc/ He distinguishes using experimental psychology to understand user behavior and usability testing. It’s an interesting distinction.  The most important difference that he identifies is that psychologists in HCI are interested in understanding basic principles of behavior that generalize across many domains whereas within usability testing it is much more important to be able to  shape and improve behavior within that particular piece of software. I’m paraphrasing that a bit.  He also emphasizes the importance of understanding and the use of psychology in software design.

I have been a big fan of Ira Glass and This American Life for quite a while now BUT I am a big fan of This American Life the NPR radio program and haven’t ever watched the Showtime TV show.  This is mostly due to the fact that I don’t get Showtime but I did figure out that you can download these episodes from iTunes.  Based on what I saw from the This American Life Live event though, I really am not sure that I want to. There is something so special about the radio show, something about radio that gets to these stories and really makes you think a bit more than a TV show might.  TV shows for whatever reason make you relax your brain and just don’t require the same imagination.  Something about the radio show really does capture the imagination.  During the “Live” event last night Ira mentioned that This American Life typically is the most frequently downloaded podcast in any given week (Wow!)  I’m surprised because I didn’t know that NPR was that popular among broad swaths of the population but I guess it’s that popular among broad swaths of the podcasting population.  At the end of the night Ira said something that I do thing captures the spirit of the show (I paraphrase): This is an ordinary show about ordinary people.  Basically, these people from all over, with their many stories are just like you and me.  Ira (Glass) also seems to have an insatiable curiosity about people. I think in another life he should have been a social psychologist. I see so many parallels between what he does and what I do.  He sees people and social interactions and he asks really interesting questions about them.  The way he answers these questions by interviewing people around the nation and finding stories.  Social psychologist answer them through scientific exploration.  In fact, he has on occasion had psychologists (even a UW psychologist) on his show.

This American Life Live was disappointly (I guess) not Live.  If it had been live I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it off work in time.  This was a live show in NYC and it was broadcast in movie theaters across the nation.  It was live in some but not here in Seattle because of the time zone issues.  There were a lot of clips from the TV show and a few TV clips that tied into older stories from the radio program which was nice.  Also, Ira answered some questions and talked a lot.  One thing I really liked was when he talked about where he got all his ideas and how he didn’t just have these ideas when he started out his career.  He basically indicated that his career was something that started out slowly and that it took him a while to develop all his “research” questions but that the questions themselves are incredibly important.  He also said it took him a while to become really good at something.  Sometimes, as a researcher,  I think it’s easy to expect to want to be good at something all at once or to want to ask the best questions or know the best questions all at once. It’s good to know that these don’t necessarily need to come to you immediately in your career but that your career can grow, etc.

It’s great to hear people writing about our stuff. Check out this interesting blog post that summarizes our ICWSM study nicely:

http://digg.com/software/How_can_software_be_better_designed_to_facilitate_social

Oh and hey, if you get a chance and want to digg it…great!

Two big presentations tomorrow at ICWSM (International Conference for Weblogs and Social Media). Check out our papers here:

http://students.washington.edu/stech/ICWSM_ThinSlices.pdf

http://students.washington.edu/stech/ICWSM_SpontInf.pdf

I’ll be talking about how people use online profiles (like Facebook profiles) to form impressions about others. This is a line of research that I conducted while I was at MSR and that I’m continuing now that I’m back. I think it’s pretty exciting stuff and hopefully these presentations will go well. They should fit nicely together.

You might recognize a familiar face in these papers. Only a few people were selected to be “profile models” for the paper but so many people and friends helped to make this paper possible so big thanks there.

In other good news, my diploma came in the mail. Now I feel like I am officially a doctor. Unfortunately my UW doctorate diploma is only about 1/10 the size of my Rice undergraduate diploma! I guess you get what you pay for?

Cool. I never win cool things but today I won a laptop because I posted my resume to a jobs site (Bio Career Center) at my school a while ago. Very exciting. I don’t know much about what type of laptop this will be but it is a Dell. More details are forthcoming.

Once again I served as a Science Fair judge for the North Seattle Deanery Middle Schools. Essentially this means that I was a judge for the private Catholic schools in the area. The particular projects that I judged were 7th grade projects. I won’t write too many details about the specific projects that I was able to view and judge but overall (with some exceptions) I was very impressed with the students. All of the students were very polite and most were well spoken. Several might even have promising careers as scientists and showed sophisticated thinking particularly for 7th graders. They separated the projects so that some judged viewed only girls’ projects and others viewed only boys. I interviewed boys.

I’m back at Microsoft Research working in a contract position with the group I previously worked at (the VIBE Group). It’s great to be back there and I’m following up with some research that is similar to what we were doing before.

Speaking of research that I was doing at MSR before, we’re presenting some of our research at http://www.icwsm.org/2008/index.shtml

There should be two very interesting papers:

Spontaneous Inference of Personality Traits from Online Profiles

Thin Slices of Online Profile Attributes