Made out of people

Bruce Sterling on the End of the World

Thanks for Liz for pointing this out to me. At SXSW, Bruce Sterling talked about what the future looks like. Liz is thinking about how to handle her 9 year olds' experience on the 'net. It's certainly too late to keep him from running into porn--it pervades the network experience, it's everyhere. Porn has changed from when I was a kid: it's no longer hidden or forbidden--it's pushing at your inbox, not pulling from behind school; it's all over the place.

The Internet is coming apart at the seams. It's choking on this stuff. I remember cops telling me in 1990 that there was no security on the Internet and that the stuff was being built hastily. Well, it's gotten really bad. It's really, really bad on the Internet right now. But what frustrates me is not what's happening in America. We've been doing this for decades. We're used to it. If you just grab some of it and email it to your earlier self, you'd be disgusted. What I'm worried about is someone in China getting a machine and plugging it in in their village, and they're swamped by the world's worst filth. The spammers and scammers are a terrifying army, but they've got carte blanche to come into our homes.

What's next? What will we think of porn in a decade or two, when we pretty much always expect porn everywhere? I assume that it's decreasing the American (at least) fear of obscenity--but will it loosen the national moral standards as some fear, or will it force us to talk about sex better and earlier?

My advisor, quoting someone else, says, "All software evolves until it has a mailer built in." And Bruce Sterling writes:

Outlook? That's a flaw with a mailer built into it.

Sometimes you have to date someone who is butt-ugly

The panel is called "Democracy and Dating: Social Computing on Purpose." While the main conversation was pretty much entirely about social action (except Pam Meyer, who gave us some amazing--but unwritten--statistics on how men and women view dating services), the back channel was fascinated by the idea of mixing the two. We've already seen ActForLove , 'the cause-oriented personals service that lets you "take action" while "getting action."'

The the question was asked in reverse. What do we learn from dating services about politics?

Michael Cornfield had the answer immediately: "Sometimes you have to date someone who is butt-ugly." It's necessary to seduce the ugly: building a coalition of voters takes a lot of people, including people who you don't agree with. In fact, Cornfield thinks this is what killed Dean: his people were enthusiasic, good at recruiting each other, but bad at building coalition and seducing people who really didn't agree with each other. If someone loved the war, were Dean volunteers ready to bring them in?

"Seducing the ugly." I'll have to keep this phrase around for a while, I think.

(Yes, I am wondering what Google hits I'm going to get on this).

Danyel

Why Blogs, Why Now?

There is virtually no technology involved in the construction of blogs that wasn't available in 1997. But somehow people tried to all build their own (perpetually-under-construction) home pages and got overwhelmed. Services like Geocities emerged to help you do this. And it was pretty much a total loss.

Blogs emerged, popularly, about a year or two ago. I wasn't sure why it they were prominent now, but I was pretty sure that it WASN'T a delayed reaction to the drop in prominence of Usenet? or the rise of Google.

Scoble disagrees. When we talked at lunch, he suggested that his own particiaption in Usenet had dropped to nothing when he created a blog. Usenet wasn't good at status: there was no way to tell the sheer coolness of a Scoble post from a noisy post by someone else. And when you wanted to disregard someone, it was extra work. The group could ban someone--but you either needed the group to agree on it; or you needed to have your own killfile.

In contrast, a blog means that you can Follow Scoble's Words (or whoever your a-list bloggers are)--and, if you dislike them, you can ignore them by dropping his RSS feed. You choose your set of authorities, and follow them. And authorities know that they have their fixed set of followers.

He also believes that Google means that you can now post something, and let the world find it. Yes, that worked on the newsgroups: but that meant an extra click or two off of the default page. Blogs are a way of making sure your voice is heard by the world, and that it's your own controlled territory.

Paul Resnick

Paul Resnick (has a blog!) is speaking at the conference on reputation systems. He uses eBay as his laboratory, because he can do semi-controlled experiments on things like the effects of reputaiton on sale price.

I've seen variants of his results before. The big picture, takeway for me is that reputation is defined temporally. That is, reputation is a factor of accumulation over time. The other aspect is that there needs to be an entrance cost to create an identity--and that entrance cost defines a maximum negative extent to which reputaiton will drop.

That is, if reptuation is costing me 10% of the cost of the things I sell--and he was able to show that negative reptuation does have a cost--and it costs $100 to join a site, then I have an incentive to hang out in the site until I want to sell $1000 worth of stuff. If it's free to create a new identity on the site, then I'll do so as soon as I have an even vaguely negative reputation. (Obviously, since cost and reputation are interfachangable, you can also start users off with a negative reputation at zero cost.)

I'm considering how this relates to the work at (for example) kuro5hin where the head is actively wrestling with reputation issues...

Cross links

Words on the conference from David Weinberger and Scoble

Clay Shirky on design errors

Clay Shirky discusses the clumsiness of the explicit networking services.

Orkut had a click. "X has added you as a friend. Are you X's friend?"
But people were indiscriminately adding too many people. So they added a second click. "Are you sure that X is your friend?"
Now they've added a third click. "How much of a friend is X? Close friend, peripheral friend, etc"

This is all trying to hack around the fact that, basically, people are good at subtle sociological judgements, but computers aren't. (Measured on the time scale of our social capacity, fire is a recent invention and agriculture is still a novelty. )

So why is it hard to do in software? Shirky's (new) law: "The more you know what you're doing, the less you know what you're doing." A new chess player can say what he's doing far more easily than a chess master (who is more likely to say "gosh, that doesn't look right.")

Then, too: "it is always tempting, as an engineer, to think that the tools you know how to use are well suited to the problem at hand."

And he ends with an "exhortation to people building software: it's tempting to believe you can create a formal model, because that's what computer work well with. Avoid that temptation. We don't need to relive the tragedy of AI as the farce of social networking. "

from left to right: Linda Stone, Joi Ito, Ze Frank, Tim O'Reilly, Clay Shirky, and Steven Johnson.

Ze Frank makes fun of Friendster

At the start of his talk, Ze Frank ran a little reel talking about his problems with Friendster.

• "Friendster asks you how you are different, and then asks you for your favorite television show."
• "Friendster looks at friends from the perspective of a loser": it makes you think you have more friends than you do.
• If this was really like real life, than you'd need to click 500 times to make someone your friend. Or drive them to the airport.

Conversely, though, he wants to play out: Britney Spears should hold an exclusive concert for people within three links of her.

-

Joi Ito--our most wired and connected member--speaks. He points out that his mobile phone now permeates virtual space (it speaks IM, for example), then gets to talking about IRC, and his own channel, #joiito. He apparently built it as a place to expand a conversation that was happening in other places that would be fairly obviously "his living room"--that is, a space that he felt he could control.

People go to #joiito for sex, for conversation--and they are fulfilling their social needs.

His rant concludes that simple infrastructures for spaces are good, especially ones that builders of sites can tweak and play with ...

Three definitions of social networks

I've heard people say "Social networking" a half-dozen times this morning, each time referring to "friend of a friend" tools. David Weinberger worried that all the good social networking is behind TOS and corporate walls, which makes it hard to repurpose or analyse.

I'm noticing several different defintions of "social networks" running about, which need disambiguation. I think we're up to three different ones, for better or worse.

1. YASNS ("Yet Another Social Network Service"--a danah coinage): This is the high-publiciity form of social networks. Friendster, Orkut, Ryze. Click in your list of friends, and let them click you back.
2. Social Network Analysis. This is the academic subfield that I have been playing in for four or so years. Interview people, draw a network diagram, calculate centrality and that sort of thing.
3. Social networks for CSCW: This is the people who scoop up social network data from various sources. Largely, this is analyzing online experience and trying to get a quantitative or--more often--qualitative picture of how groups

Now, I grant that (1) may be the one that's making the headlines, making the VC money, and has six million users (on Friendster) running about shouting "social networks". And I'm pretty sure that the word has been completely taken over by a new context. But I sitll try and fight the pure fight. And sometimes I just try to find a new word for what I actually do.

(In other news, I just watched a UI change happen at Ryze. As I was sitting here, Adrian Scott tapped a little bit of PHP, hacked a script, and then uploaded it. That's kind of cool.)

"Don't Blog This"

Nardi may be "blogging this" (as her paper title assures us), but there's a degree of hyper-awareness out here that blogs are ubiquitous. There's a wiki, there's an IRC back-channel, there's a slew of prolific and influential bloggers ... and there's people who really, really want to gossip.

So far, after just a few hours of a conference, I've heard the phrase "don't blog this" four or five times.

(Photo: Richard Scoble is blogging this. With Marc Canter )

The Bellevue Apple Store

When I interned here eight years ago, Bellevue was a small town, with a few shopping strips and a lot of empty and low-density lots. It's now built up a fair bit, largely as shopping area occupied by Microsoft employees. Which raises the interesting question... just who shops at the Bellevue mall Apple store?

One topic, many voices

This weekend, I'm off to the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium

It's a chance for those of us in the social computing field to get a chance to talk to each other: there are research groups at a variety of schools, teams at Microsoft, IBM (twice!), and a variety of other places, just on the CHI-attending, CSCW-publishing, SOCNET-reading academic side.

Then there's the bloggers. A fair number of bloggers--some academic, some from other backgrounds--spend a great deal of time studying blogs. (The course-oriented, now-defunct Metablog was a nod to that. The fact that there's a startling number of Google hits on metablog suggests I am not the first to notice this.

I'm now thinking about the symposium, and how information travels through the internet, and how these relate to each other.

There's certainly a well-known layer of bloggers, and some of those are coming out, too. Of course, word spread about the event, and now it has a virtual observer --and its own blog-sized tempest about just what sort of people were invited, and whether it's secret, and why it's invitation only, and whether this goes against the whole purpose of symposia, or of blogs, or of the web. (Read comments on Scoble's last , for example, to get some idea of more negative reactions.)

I guess I'm fascinated by several things. One is the deep desire to see each other face-to-face. As a CSCW researcher, I'm not really all that surprised: collaborative work is faster and easier when you meet face to face¹. People like seeing each other, and getting a broader channel. On the other hand, we really like to tell a story about how distance doesn't matter. Perhaps we're coming to a better understanding of how the factors interrelate. And sometimes, you just need to come to the party.

The other is the way that the story echoed. David Wenberger has persuasively argued that the internet (or, at least, the world of blogs) is not an echo chamber. Rather, it's a place where people of like minds can explore the places where they disagree without having to rehash the basics, over and over again.

It may not be an echo chamber, but the discussion of the Social Computing conference got awfully loud. And it's not that other discussions of equal value aren't happening in other places: how about Scientists, designers seek same for good conversation: A Workshop on Online Dating? Or WS#19. Social Learning through Gaming?

Somehow, these haven't crossed the collective blogosphere's field of view. They aren't interesting yet. Why does the one echo, and the other doesn't?

For some insight, I'll turn to VanDyke's model of how news travels on the internet, which suggests that there's a comparatively small number of channels for information. I'd read a second-order idea, which is that there's a limited number of topics that the blogs can "pay attention to" at once. It's a combination of wanting to stay current, and of wanting to respond to each other--but either way, when the agenda is set on (say) "Bush and Vietnam", the political blogs on both sides pretty much stick to the topic, dedicating half or more of their coverage to the one topic.

We may criticize TV news for having a short attention span, and for only wanting to talk about one thing at a time. Certainly, the blog world does better than that in many ways: it seems to be more willing to check Lexis/Nexis, to pull up old interviews, to remember lost details.

But there are far more stories happening than Blogdex will tell me. More than news.google will tell me. A scan over the front section of the New York Times will tell me about more stories than will Instapundit or Atrios from their various sides.

So in summary: I'd suggest that the internet that isn't quite an echo chamber in the diversity of opinoins--but is a little constrained as to topics.

¹ Note to self: Think about the connections between the rise of the internet and distributed work, and the new movements toward extreme co-location. Why is it that we're inventing stuff like XP (face to face, one keyboard, customer on-site), at the same time that we've got an internet so cool we can edit movies and write code around the world? Perhaps it's the case that we're now tried the distributed thing, and--well, it's not always right. (IIRC, Joel Spolsky's written about the competitive advantage of not offshoring before...)

Because it had to be said

Damn you, Paul Dourish! and here and, generally, here.

I try to do my part...

When the world changes: a review of "Goodbye, Lenin"

I just saw Goodbye, Lenin in the theater on Saturday, It's a recent German film, about the insanity of life when the Berlin Wall fell, and the many changes that happened when a stable system collapses in on itself. Despite that, it's a relaxed comedy (ranging toward farce, at times: I'd place it in about the same genre as The Dish , if a little more thoughtful.). A good film, a painstaking film, and one worth seeing. In German, with subtitles.

[Slight spoilers and discussion follow]

In the movie, we see life in East Germany before and after the wall falls. Under Communism, life is fairly predicable: students go to school, eat food, learn pioneer anthems, and try to sort out the propaganda from the news, often poorly. Then, in 1989, everything becomes different. The government collapses, the Berlin Wall falls, and East Germans wander west to discover the joys of a new world.

At the time, Aleks, the protagonist, is just starting his adult life. His mother has been a strong patriot ("married to the state") since his father fled the country at a conference into the arms of a comely West German, and has dedicated herself to teaching and raising a new generation of strident communists. She had a heart attack, though, and no one got to her in time--throwing her into a coma for eight months.

She misses the tremendous social changes entirely.

In those months, Aleks gets a job; his sister drops out of her college economics program (and who wouldn't, under the circumstances); and the old communist groceries are replaced with new supermarkets. Everyone redecorates with colors; they buy cars; they live a newer, freeer life.

Aleks' mother recovers. She must be shielded, however, from surprise: another heart attack might kill her. Presumably, the fall of her beloved government and the end of her government teaching job would kill her. So Aleks goes on a mission to simulate life from another world.

From eight months earlier.

The lengths he goes to--and the ways that the world's events keep grinding on--are what makes up the comedy of the film. The farce comes of the increasingly-desperate attempts to keep the seams from unravelling.

But I was fascinated by one thread that the filmmakers pursued skillfully. Not since Hedwig [1] have I seen so thorough a portrayal of the sacrafices that come of a system changing. In Hedwig's case, of course, the fall of the wall is ironic. In this case, it's a little bit melancholic: a world has ended, even if it wasn't a particularly good world. The people who had figured out a way to surive--party members, teachers--are stunned, confused, lost. The new world is filled with shining cars and Coca-Cola--but it's also got empty apartments and a newly-impoverished population.

It's not an indictment of communism (the movie is fairly neutral, I think), nor is it an indictment of capitalism. The movie isn't even against change: there's a lot of joy in the crowds when the walls fall, and we see various bits of video enough to know that the people truly are excited about the new opportunities, the new world.

But it's still hard when your job, when your life, has been to hold up a system that's now gone. For those people, Aleks provides an invaluable service: he lets them hold on, a little longer, and perhaps helps them ease the transition.

Both worlds--East Berlin, before and after--are beautifully fleshed out. The costuming and decorations are precise, painstaking. It really does look like 1989², and it really does look like a communist-era apartment. It's the transition between the two, at dizzying speed but with tremendous care, that gives this movie its strength.

¹ "Six inches forward, five inches back..."

² Except for that t-shirt. IMDB claims it's a joke, others claim it's an error. I was weirded out by seeing the "Matrix" on a 1989 t-shirt.

I may be in the wrong field

On their way back inside, I ask one of them, a blonde in a turquoise miniskirt and now, of course, a hard-earned GGW [Girls Gone Wild] hat, what they do when they are not on spring break. "We're grad students," she says, with only a slight slur. "It's sad. We'll have Ph.D.s in three years."

In what, I ask.

"Anthropology."

Dispatches From Girls Gone Wild

My PhD has never been like that.

Multiple dimensions

Might you be a libertarian? Rate yourself on social and personal liberty

Maybe you sit better on a multiple-axis personality set: Myers-Briggs from Extroversion-Introversion; Sensing-Intuition; Thinking-Feeling; and Judging-Percieving.

Maybe the axes you need are dwarf-elf; ninja-pirate

It seems that we get these several-dimension systems every once in a while. I find them as cool as anyone else: I want to see where I fall onto various scales¹. I think that mostly what's fascinating about them is the fact that there is more than one dimension, and that gives them a certain degree of universality. We're all pretty annoyed at the charicatures of "left to right" or "good to evil," but with two dimensions---ah, with two dimensions, we can express some choices.

And we can draw it nicely on paper. Which leaves us with cool maps that are nicely clear and highly visible.

In other words, the 2×2 analysis appeals to our sense of fairness, our sense of balance. And it's hard enough that we can stick with the two, thankyouverymuch.

Of course, there's no guarantee that two dimension are nearly enough: for example, one research project that I was involved in casually found that movie preferences wanted something like five dimensions to cover the vast majority of the variation in the sample.

Perhaps five dimensions would be a more useful scale. Could we, perhaps, modify this usful system? We might now analyze a given person on the five-dimensional space of rockity, paperness, lizardicity, spockacity, and scissizznit.

--

¹ One friend of mine was taking an undergrad abnormal psychology class. A side effect of such classes is that all students end up reading, then ranking themselves and their friends, by the entirety of the DSM IV . She wandered about shouting that various people were "scale six!"--a reference to a five-point scale of adjustedness. I guess exceeding the bounds isn't quite the same sort of phenomenon, but it gives the same sense of placing people on a scale.

ET Needs Home

Edwart Tufte's popular Ask ET forum is being temporarily shut down while he crunches on his book.

I'm contemplating the merits of setting up a photo.net (OpenACS) server somewhere--it's the same thing he has--and see whether I can't convince a subset of the crowd to migrate over. It's a tricky adoption problem, and that's after I get it set up.

And assuming ET is interested in helping redirect traffic.

Unfortunately, the only volunteer I've found is offering a Windows server, and OpenACS seems to be less than stable on Windows.

Knowing what I do about online communities and adoption, I'm half-tempted to not bother. But I've found the fora serve a useful function for me, and it would be a shame to see it die off.

My computer is noisy

I don't like Noisy. Noisy scares me.

When I bought my Dell¹ (dude!), it was silent. Dead silent. Quiet enough that I downloaded an LED program to tell me when the hard disk was doing anything. And, with the screen off, I only knew it was running at all because if I ran Fight AIDS at Home I'd hear a low, steady hum from the fans.

Now, eight months later, the hum is a whine. And it's pretty much always on. And when the computer shuts down, the whine stops in two phases. It's a chord, I guess, since it changes once when the hard disk spins down, and a second time when the fan stops.

I don't like this. I've opened it up and vacuumed lightly a few times, and that seemed to get rid of some of the dust. But I am still wondering whether the noise is impending computer failure, or impending hard disk failure, or merely bad luck.

Not to mention, I don't like working at home, because the noise is getting kind of loud.

Anyone have experience? Clever ideas?

Anyone know? Anyone

¹ Dimension 4500

Happy distraction moment

How. This is cool:
InfocomBot

If you have an AOL Instant Messenger account, send an IM to InfocomBot or InfocomBot2. I set up an automated bot to play classic Infocom text adventure games from your favorite IM client, T-Mobile Sidekick, or any other device that connects to AIM. It supports "save" and "restore" commands, so you don't need to lose your place.

Life in Irvine

I applied to the University of California, Irvine, writing program and I was accepted. I went to visit it and I thought it was more than I could handle – in terms of having to get on a six-lane freeway to get a gallon of milk, trying to figure out which one was my building among 16 identical huge high rises in a building complex. I was really frightened of it.

Francesca Delbanco, in an interview in the Morning News

Where Ebay leads

It's a marvelous world. Where ebay leads , private industry is sure to follow

Interestingly, the ebay auctions seem to have pretty much died off.

Interestingly, the slick-website version is pretty similar. Two months, $45 or so. It gets you email, a couple of letters, maybe an IM chat or two. Some product differentiation based on looks, the amount of time they offer to put into the endeavour, and whether they promise a tearful goodbye or not.

Yet more JUNG/Soylent

(Ok, I'm sticking this one in the extended entry. Unless, you know, you're really hooked on social network diagrams. Warning: yet more black and white graph pictures attached.)

So I've been ginning up images for the CSCW paper. In my last paper, I talked about the Butterfly Pattern, one in which a single person connects two contexts.

When I processed it, I noticed that it spanned two chronological periods: the white wing is an "early" wing; the dark gray is a 'later" wing.

All this is fine so far. But, you know, a little ugly. It's not really a butterfly: Kafo there kinda is leaning hard to the right side, even if he is the sole bridge between two clusters (the definition we're using). Part of this is because the right cluster is so ... plain. They're all structurally equivalent -- which means, in this case, that they're all on the same mailing list. So my program cleverly draws them as a single chunk. Kind of dull.

Then, looking through one user's data, I found this marvelous diagram. This is pretty much as perfect a butterfly pattern as a guy could want. Two contexts. Two wings. "My friends from school." "My friends from outside school." And, joining them, "my girlfriend."

Image pipeline makes a difference

I'm pushing for a Friday deadline, but I started wondering what the best way to embed a word image in a document is. A few of my previous articles have looked incredibly ugly because I have a resized screen capture somewhere dropped in there,

Two weeks back, I had discussed that screen dump utility. But when the bullet hits the metaphorical bone, what happens?

The attached document was generated in Microsoft Word 2002, running on Windows XP. I then used PDF 995 to generate PDFs of the document.

Download file

The four quadrants show different output options: a PNG grabbed by an alt-printscreen screengrab, a PNG generated from my little dump utility, and two EPS's generated by the dump utility. One of them was imported into Illustrator, then exported with fonts embedded. The other is placed pretty much just as it was exported. Note that it doesn't use the lettershapes feature, so the EPS contains only raw text.

I have it at 100% and reduced to a nicely hard-to-divide number. 46%.

Excel as a database

Brilliant.

from Neopolean, and via god knows where.

More JUNG/Soylent pictures

This is the deadline week for CSCW papers, so I'm not actually terribly functional this week. But deadline weeks are also when I go through my image libraries to find things to illustrate my papers with.

Here's a few tweaks to JUNG, and a few tweaks to Soylent, and we get something that--I think--begins to tell a little bit of a story. Darker colors are more recent; lighter colors are older.

And this person, at the large square in the middle, has three different interlinked clusters around him, roughly arranged by date.

As before, if this is a snapshot of my mail, it's centered on one friend of mine (noted with a larger square). We read an edge on this graph to mean "I have made a connection--by mututally emailing both--between these two people." And now an edge, and a node, is labelled by my MOST RECENT encounter.

Note that some edges are a little lighter or darker than the edges around them--that suggests a relationship that continued a little longer than the ones around it.

Some nodes are darker than the edges they connect to. That means that my relationship with the person at the end of the edge has continued on beyond my interaction with the pair of them. For example, that's how "I still chat with both of them individually, even though they're no longer dating" would look. It's also how "colleagues A & B worked with me on a project a while back" would look.

Broken Stuff

I rather like This Is Broken , Mark Hurst (of "Good Experience":[http://www.goodexperience.com/]) weblog of stuff that doesn't work.

I'm particularly pleased, of course, at my own contribution here
 

Target currently advertises the DVD of BASIC for $14.44, PRICE CUT from $19.99. But flip up the new price tag and see what was below it... the old price, of $14.44.

But you might also enjoy some of these others...

Taxes: A moment from my personal life.

Largely, this weblog is professional work. But once in a while, I need to tell a little something about the rest of the time.

Last year, I worked at IBM Research/Watson/Cambridge for several months, and on into a little bit of January.

A little bit of January, of course, means a little bit of tax year 2003. This means I need to file in two states: California (for my UCI income), and Massachusets, for my IBM income. It's no problem: the part-year paperwork is actually reasonable in both states, and I did it last year.

This year, however, I looked closely at my W-2. Which says that my state taxes were withheld in New York. It seems that someone at IBM dropped the paperwork, and I became a New York taxpayer accidentally.

In the next month, then, I need to:

1. Get a W2-C from IBM apologizing for the error, and acknowledging that I lived and worked in Massachusets.
2. File in New York, saying that I didn't live or work there, and need the witholdings back.
3. File in Massachusets, saying that I DID live and work there for some time, and need to send them money. The tax rate will also wander upward: 5.3% from New York's 4%.
4. File in California, saying that I earned salaray in CA (in eleven months) and a little extra in Massachusets (in one month)

Three tax returns. One of which is asking for all the money back. One of which earned a rather high monthly rate for a very short period of time.

Let's see if I survive this...

Update
So the IRS tells you about a lot of services that allow the impoverished (startlingly, that's me right now) to :file for free . Few of the services mention that they charge for state returns.... until you've gone through the forms. At which point H&R Block wants $20 / state. And I have three states.

Update 2
Of course, all this is made slightly irrelevant by the fact that I need to wait on the W-2-C from IBM. Which hasn't even been signed by the relevant two managers. I like parts of the company, but the admin drives me nuts.

If I file without the W-2-C, I pay a penalty to Massachusets for having held back on them. Also, I trigger a nasty phone call from the New York Attorney General, who wants to know why I claimed to have earned nothing.

So this week, I'm filling out request for extension forms.

Update 3
Well, while I wait, I might as well fill in my federal forms. My dad bought TaxCut, and so I tried it out. I'm fine with the fact that they want $29.95 for the state addition--but then another $29.95 for every additional state? Who are these people kidding?

I love a good survey

A few of my friends research team here at UCI is doing a blog survey. Want to help out?

It's the Blog Survey here

Extortion comes online

I periodically wondered what would happen when the Mob went online:

That's a fine server you have there. Very pretty. I see you've got it all--SSL, PHP--gosh, what can you serve with server like that these days? Couple thousand pages a second? It would be a real shame to see a distributed denial-of-service attack hit that server. Fortunately, Guido here is an expert in preventing those denial-of-service attacks, and for a strictly nominal fee, he'll be glad to help provide it.

Now, via Volokh I am astounded to discover that it's actually happening.

Online betting sites fight cyberextortion

Online gambling sites are fertile territory for extortionists. Many of the approximately 2,000 sites are vulnerable to hacking attacks and have little legal recourse because Internet gambling is illegal in the USA, security experts say.

Most [extortionists] issue ultimatums in e-mail messages in the days leading to major sporting events, such as the Super Bowl. Often, threats are issued after an attack, demanding that American currency be sent to a Western Union office.

It seems that the particular point of vulnerability is the fact that gamblers want to place their bets immediately before the event--so that it's possible to concentrate an attack on a very small time window. (That, combined with the fact that these gambling organizations are a little shady, providing an illegal service to Americans, means that it's hard for them to get legal or enforcement relief.)

I'm reminded of the historical threat of a "run on the banks," or the stock market panic, when everyone decides to access certain financial resources all at once.

Social Networks Needn't Be Evil

A little while ago, I wrote up an entry: A Stance on Networks
In it, I argued that social networks can be useful and meaningful, not only on a large--external--scale, but on smaller, local one.

I'm reminded of this because I was recently forwarded a list of business proposals for "how social networks can be used in business." Roughly, that list looked at tasks like:

• Find schisms between departments and groups by seeing who isn't talking to someone else
• Figure out who has management potential by who they talk to
• Cellular phone companies could mine logs to help sell promotions.

Don't do that to me!

All of these have in common that I don't want them done to my data--and I doubt you do, either. I really don't want a computer program sniffing through my email deciding whether I have management potential (credit reports aren't bad enough?).

Let's tenatatively call those "evil." Perhaps it's too broad a word, but I take my field seriously. And I need to justify the title of this post.

I tend to think that a good manager would already know about growing schisms--and, if not, social network analysis should be one tool of several to use when an organizational development consultant comes through to discuss how the group can develop. Rob Cross:http://gates.comm.virginia.edu/rlc3w/sna.htm , for example, is a researcher, now at UVa, who comes into groups for specific social network interventions and examinations. The idea of his discrete studies don't bother me as much as being continuously watched does.

Don't make me answer that!

There's also the Friendsters and Orkuts of the world: what danah boyd has taken to calling "publically articulated social networks." As she has articulately pointed out, using a tool like Friendster forces you to list out--in some detail--who your friends are and who you are connected to. Worse, it makes you make a bunch of binary decisions (is a friend! is not a friend!).

Personally, I'm pretty bad at those decisions, which is why my Orkut profile has a few people waiting in "can't decide" limbo. (I'm scared to log in at this point. I think it's probably offensive for me to not decide, but I have no idea what to choose.)

Update: Clay Shirky points out that Orkut is now asking you to rate "how good a friend." Great. Now I have five levels of possibly insulting someone.

This isn't so much "evil," as uncomfortable. I feel looked at, captured, in the same way that I feel when I hear about how Japanese teens have evolved conventions, wherein the cardinal sin is turning off your cell phone or running out of batteries. I like having my cell phone off!

So what use is it?

Fortunately, I think that there are positive uses. Despite the ominous title of this article, for example, Microsoft wants to know who your friends are , I think the article suggests a much more friendly notion of networks:

People are also key to the work done on computers. In both Longhorn and an upcoming version of Office for the Mac, Microsoft is using the idea of "projects"--or ad hoc groups of people and documents that change over time...

A more tech-savvy version of the handwritten list, Cheng said, would contain all the messages from each member of a person's inner circle. The list would be "zoomable"--meaning that if one really wanted a message from Bruce, but only Anne and Christopher showed up on the list, one could click between the two and get a list of all the Bs that didn't make the inner circle list.

And the Microsoft design teams are all over it. This article shows an interesting (if under-documented) interface concept.

Note the sheer number of people and little networks in this interface: there's a cluster of them in the top left corner, just hanging out; there's another little mass out there in the bottom right, in the current activitie

I like that. People hanging out in the interface. Good place for 'em, too, I say.

java screen dump util

techie alert

I generate a lot of screenshots--and, well, windows "print screen" tends to look pretty darn ugly. The other night, I started thinking, "what if I could dump to EPS?"

Turns out someone beat me to it with this rather useful (GPL'd) package. So with that spurring me on, I've gone ahead and built a wrapper around it that allows simple dumps to both EPS (using this package) and to PNG (using javax.io). I haven't gotten around to JPG or GIF, but it would be pretty much the same code as the PNG (leave a comment if you want it.)

If nothing else, this keeps me from having to google around to remember how to export to an image.

Download the JAR here
Javadoc here

The basic usage is fairly simple:

Dump dumper = new EPSDump(); 
dumper.dumpComponent(new File("foo"), myPanel); 

Enjoy.

UPDATE: I just realized that it doesn't handle transparency. There's probably a couple of Swing gotchas in there... on the other hand, the results really do look pretty--at least! Those of us with PCs can at last have Java screenshots that look almost as good as Mac screenshots.

Here's one from a little code I've produced in JUNG. The pink circles are users of a network software who partiticapted in a study; the lines are "friend of" connections; the light blue circles are individuals; the blue strips are sets of individuals that have the same connectivity.

eps

** UPDATE **
I guess it would be useful to tack this to, say, a keyboard shortcut, like "alt-P".

In your component or window intialization, call

addPrintAction( myDumpablePanel );

and somewhere in there have some code like

addPrintAction( JComponent jp ) {
   Action printAction = new PrintAction(jp);
   KeyStroke k = KeyStroke.getKeyStroke("alt P");
   jp.getInputMap(JComponent.WHEN_IN_FOCUSED_WINDOW).put(k, "printscreen");
   jp.getActionMap().put("printscreen", printAction);
}

And then the actual dump:

static class PrintAction extends AbstractAction {
   private JComponent component;
   public PrintAction(JComponent jp) {
      this.component = jp;
    }
   public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
      EPSDump dumper = new EPSDump();
      dumper.textVector = false;
      try {
         System.out.println("Dumping!");
         dumper.dumpComponent(new File("foo.eps"), component);
       } catch (IOException e1) {
         System.out.println("Dump failed");
       }
    }

good luck...

Networks Everywhere!

Interesting to see lots of pictures of networks in lots of contexts coming out and around.

via many-2-many Rob Cross explains social network analysis for business in a brief, but nicely illustrated manner.

via danah this cool site on tangible social networks connecting people to each other with balloons and ribbons. It's an interesting tangible network, although the images make it pretty clear that it's not really possible to actually figure out things like, "who is connected to whom."

Among other things, this being an art gallery, you probably can't touch the art. Which is too bad, because it turns out that with ribbons, it's very easy to figure out shortest-distance algorithms. To get the shortest distance from person A to person B, just grab the balloons representing A and B, and pull them apart. Then locate the really tight strings. That's the shortest path between A and B.

Ebay, Orkut, and Feedback

It's been mentioned by a few others that Orkut invitations were, for a little while, on sale on eBay.

I decided to check again and see what the going rate is. It's down to $0.99-$2 (from $3.50-$11 in early March) with a low end of $0.01

One cent? How can anyone afford to sell an Orkut invitation for a cent? Clearly, they must be looking for something...

(Wow. It's "Bid, no pay!" That's right, it's FREE.)

... like ebay feedback.

Go to our ebay store. Click here !http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=36107&item=3661487616&ssPageName=STRK:MESSE:IT, go through the process of feedback if you believe this transaction to be to your satisfaction, and an invitation will be sent to you shortly.

That's right. Provide feedback first, get the invite afterward. The result? This seller is (as of 3/2) up to 99.4% pure, with a score of 159. Apparently, he's making up for a piece of bad feedback a year ago--and it's worked. He's gotten 154 pieces of positive feedback in just the last month!

Now, I don't mean to pick on this particular seller. I'm more interested in the general phenomenon of giving away costless stuff on ebay to jack up your feedback.

update Apparently, there's a subcommunity of "feedback exchange" types: people who sell each other very little in exhange for giving each other a good solid backslap. Does Ebay have to implement PageRank, or some similar algorithm, in order to catch cheaters?

Spam and Misspellings

I got this email today:

Çi£iås is the number one european prescribed med for secksual disfunktion. Hands down better than vighagrra. Half a DosÉ is equal to 2 DosÉs of vihargra. 0rdér now and recieve a double 0rdér phree

I suppose that spammers send out mail because they get responses--but it's hard to imagine anyone actually responding to this ad. At last! a prahduckt so poorlie speld that it pazzes my spam fliter! eye must bie it!