Wednesday, December 31, 2014

2014 Blog in Review


The year 2014 marks the first full calendar year in existance for the Slow Searching blog. In the past twelve months I have written 54 posts, including this one. Almost half of these posts (24) were about Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. The other large chunk (23) focused primarily on research, including  a sizeable group (9) about selfsourcing. The remaining seven posts touched on a variety of topics, including three related to gender issues in the computer science.

Some of the most popular Slow Searching posts of 2014 were about:

Monday, December 22, 2014

2014 Research in Review


This post summarizes the research I published in 2014. The work divides roughly into three components covering: 1) slow search, 2) crowdsourcing, and 3) face-to-face social interaction.

Slow Search
We live in a world where the pace of everything from communication to transportation is getting faster. In recent years a number of "slow movements" have emerged that advocate for reducing speed in exchange for increasing quality. These include the slow food movement, slow parenting, slow travel, and even slow science. Building on these movements we have been exploring the concept of slow search, where search engines use additional time to provide a higher quality search experience than is possible given conventional time constraints.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Paper Summary: A Crowd of Your Own


A Crowd of Your Own: Crowdsourcing for On-Demand Personalization
HCOMP 2014 (Notable Paper)
 
A lot of my research explores personalization. Personalization is a way for computers to support people’s diverse interests and needs by providing content tailored to the individual. However, despite clear evidence that personalization can improve our information experiences, it remains very hard for computers to actually understand individual differences.

Monday, November 10, 2014

A Formula for Academic Papers: Related Work


The Related Work section of an academic paper is often the section that graduate students like writing the least. But it is also one of the most important sections to nail as the paper heads out for review. The Related Work section serves many purposes, several of which relate directly to reviewing:
  • The person handling the submission will use the referenced papers to identify good reviewers,
  • Reviewers will look at the references to confirm that the submission cites the appropriate work,
  • Everyone will use the section to understand the paper's contributions given the state of existing research, and
  • Future researchers will look to the Related Work section to identify other papers they should read.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Data Banks


Each of us individually create a huge amount of data online. Some of this data we create explicitly, such as when we make webpages or public facing profiles, write emails, or author documents. But we also create a lot of data implicitly as a byproduct of our interactions with digital information. These implicit data includes the search queries we issue, the webpages we visit, and our online social networks.

The data we create is valuable. We can use it to understand more about ourselves, and services can use it to personalize our experiences and understand people’s information behavior in general. But despite the fact that we are the ones who create the data, much of it is not actually in our possession. Instead, it resides with companies that provide us with online services in exchange for it. A handful of powerful companies have a monopoly on our data.
Definition of monopoly: the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service
Definition of data monopoly: the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in an individual’s personal data

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Help! I'm Sexist!


The research studies I posted last Friday about the role gender plays in the STEM workplace paint a consistent picture: women face significant discrimination. Women are paid (and hired, and tenured) less than men with the same qualifications, and these gender differences are particularly large for parents. While women are often encouraged to address the existing disparities by advocating for themselves (e.g., by being assertive, negotiating, or encouraging diversity), research shows this type of behavior typically incurs a further penalty.

Instead, gender disparities in the STEM workplace are a problem that the entire community must address. Hiring managers need to hire more women. Managers need to promote more women. And peers need to accept diverse communication styles without the lens of gender.

Importantly, however, this does not just mean that MEN need to hire (and promote, and accept) more. Because the other consistent picture that arose from the studies I posted on Friday is that both men AND WOMEN discriminate against women. We all have deep seated biases that contribute to the problem.

Friday, October 3, 2014

Research about Gender in the STEM Workplace


Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students by Corinne A. Moss-Racusina et al.
In a study with 127 science faculty at research-intensive universities, candidates with identical resumes were more likely to be offered a job and paid more if their name was "John" instead of "Jennifer." The gender of the faculty participating did not impact the outcome.

How Stereotypes Impair Women’s Careers in Science by Ernesto Reuben et al.
Men are much more likely than women to be hired for a math task, even when equally qualified. This happens regardless of the gender of the hiring manager.

Measuring the Glass Ceiling Effect: An Assessment of Discrimination in Academia by Katherine Weisshaar
In computer science, men are significantly more likely to earn tenure than women with the same research productivity. [From a summary]

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Evidence from Behavior

 


Doug Oard at the Information School at the University of Maryland is teaching an open online course on information retrieval this fall (INST 734). Above is the brief cameo lecture I recorded using Office Mix for the segment on Evidence from Behavior.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The #GreatWalk Recap


Cale and I completed our 100 mile #GreatWalk from Bellevue, WA to Great Wolf Lodge. We live-blogged on Twitter as we walked, and I have recorded our tweets on this blog in chronological order to make them easy to read. Thanks for sharing our journey with us!
  • Day 1: We depart!
  • Day 2: A long walk to the airport
  • Day 3: Getting tired and frustrated
  • Day 4: A candy discovery
  • Day 5: Skirting the military base
  • Day 6: A wet and rainy day
  • Day 7: Into the wilderness
  • Day 8: We arrive at Great Wolf!
  • Day 9: A day of rest
  • Day 10: The trip home
Some interesting external links about the adventure:

#GreatWalk: Day 10

[This post includes my tweets (@jteevan) from the tenth day (July 27, 2014) of Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!]

#GreatWalk: Day 9

[This post includes my tweets (@jteevan) from the ninth day (July 26, 2014) of Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!]

#GreatWalk: Day 8

[This post includes my tweets (@jteevan) from the eighth day (July 25, 2014) of Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!]

#GreatWalk: Day 7

[This post includes my tweets (@jteevan) from the seventh day (July 24, 2014) of Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!]

#GreatWalk: Day 6

[This post includes my tweets (@jteevan) from the sixth day (July 23, 2014) of Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!]

#GreatWalk: Day 5

[This post includes my tweets (@jteevan) from the fifth day (July 22, 2014) of Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!]

#GreatWalk: Day 4

[This post includes my tweets (@jteevan) from the fourth day (July 21, 2014) of Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!]

#GreatWalk: Day 3

[This post includes my tweets (@jteevan) from the third day (July 20, 2014) of Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!]

#GreatWalk: Day 2

[This post includes my tweets (@jteevan) from the second day (July 19, 2014) of Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!]

#GreatWalk: Day 1

[This post includes my tweets (@jteevan) from the first day (July 18, 2014) of Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!]

Friday, July 18, 2014

Live Blogging Our 100 Mile Walk


After months of planning, Cale and I start our 100 mile walk from Bellevue, WA to Great Wolf in Grand Mound, WA today! Friends and family will see us off with a bon voyage party at 4pm.

Watch Us Walk

I will be live blogging as we walk on Twitter. Follow @jteevan or search for #GreatWalk for updates. Note that you do not need a Twitter account to see the tweets; just click on either of the two preceding links. [Update: The tweets we posted have been collected here.]

Walk Background 

The Route

We will follow this schedule:

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

100 Mile Walk: The Trip Home


[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of  our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

Start: Great Wolf Lodge
End: Centralia Amtrak Station
Total distance: 6.4 miles

After a full day of no walking (but lots of MagiQuesting and water sliding), it will be time to head home. No, we are not walking another 100 miles home! Instead, we will take a short walk on our weary legs to the local Amtrak station and catch the train to Seattle.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Packing for Our 100 Mile Walk


Good news! Everything Cale and I plan to bring with us on our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf fits into a single backpack. I'll be able to carry the pack on my own for most of the walk, and Cale can relieve me occasionally. The total weight of our inventory (including the clothes we will be wearing) is 18 pounds. It includes:

Monday, July 14, 2014

100 Mile Walk: The Final Leg


[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of  our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

Start: Offut Lake Resort
End: Great Wolf Lodge
Total distance: 14.6 miles

Friday, July 25, one week after setting out from Bellevue, Cale and I will finish our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf!

Sunday, July 13, 2014

100 Mile Walk: Day Seven


[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of  our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

Start: Holiday Inn Express, Lacey
End: Offut Lake Resort
Total distance: 11.8 miles

On Day Seven, Cale and I veer away from I-5, in part because there are no hotels along the highway between Lacey and Great Wolf, and in part because we are excited to stay in a Cozy Cabin on Offut Lake. Today's walk and destination may be our prettiest. It will certainly be our most pastoral. We will need to stock up on water and snacks for the rode, because there is a long stretch where I do not expect us to encounter convenience stores or gas stations. The directions here are slightly more detailed because I worry I might loose cell service along the way (and thus the ability to navigate dynamically as we walk from my phone).

Friday, July 11, 2014

100 Mile Walk: Day Six

 
[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of  our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

Start: Hampton Inn & Suites DuPont
End: Holiday Inn Express, Lacey
Total distance: 14.1 miles

On Day Six Cale and I will spend most of the day walking west. Nothing particularly interesting stands out about Day Six as I explore the details, but it will be fun to get close to Olympia, our state capital. And it is our last day tracking I-5; on Day Seven we veer south and head off on our own.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

100 Mile Walk: Day Five


[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of  our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

Start: Holiday Inn Express
End: Hampton Inn & Suites DuPont
Total distance: 9.5 miles or 12.4 miles, depending

Today is intentionally a short as the crow flies because I expect it to be filled with obstacles. We have to get from one side of the Joint Base Lewis-McChord to the other, and the base is closed. Unfortunately, the base is also huge, so it is not feasible to go around it. The Visitor Center, where we would need to go to get a permit for access, is only accessible by car from I-5. I am hoping to figure out a way to get permission to walk through the base without having to go there, but am not sure how to go about doing this. If you have ideas, please share!

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

100 Mile Walk: Day Four


[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of  our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

I need to get moving on planning the details of Cale and my itinerary, since the walk is less than a month away now! Even after I finish today, I'll still have three more days to map out.

Start: Emerald Queen Hotel and Casino, 9:00am
End: Holiday Inn Express, 4:00pm
Total distance: 12.6 miles

Friday, May 23, 2014

Related Work: Find It If You Can


Find It If You Can: A Game for Modeling Different Types of Web Search Success Using Interaction Data
Mikhail Ageev, Qi Guo, Dmitry Lagun, Eugene Agichtein
SIGIR 2011

A lot of recent search research makes use of large-scale query log analysis. This poses a challenge for researchers who are not affiliated with a major search engine, because there are very few public logs available research community. Find It If You Can, by Ageev et al., provides a nice example of how information retrieval researchers might gather their own search logs. And in doing so, it also addresses a persistent challenge with using logs: the fact that while we know what users are doing, we don't actually know what they are thinking.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

The Dangers of Sharing Log Data


A lot of my research relies on analyzing behavioral log data, including query logs (example: personal navigation), web browser logs (example: web revisitation patterns), social media logs (example: #TwitterSearch), IM logs (example: impact of availability state), and GPS traces (example: trajectory-aware search). Behavioral logs provide a picture of human behavior as seen through the lens of the system that captures and records user activity.

However, behavioral logs can also provide a picture of a specific individual, and as such raise privacy concerns. Would you be willing to share your query history with me? I search for fairly mundane things, but even so, there’s no way I’d share an unfiltered version of my queries with you. As a result, despite good intentions several companies that have tried to make behavioral logs available to the research community have ended up in hot water. The two best known examples are AOL and Netflix.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Public Behavioral Logs


Large-scale behavioral log analysis allows us to do many things, including build better search engines, predict health epidemics, and support communities through crises. But they can also be hard to come by. This post covers some of the different types of publicly available behavioral logs available for study.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Turning Our Personal Devices into Social Devices


Our smartphones allow us to connect with the rest of the world from anywhere. Ironically, however, they also tend to disconnect us from the world immediately around us. But rather than fight the creep of technology into our social spaces, there is the opportunity to reframe our personal devices as social devices.

As we start using our phones to interact with the people who are near us, there are a number of unique aspects of our interaction that mobile applications can capitalize on. Co-located collaborators can see each other, talk with each other, and share surrounding context. This is why it is easier to have a conversation with someone while driving if the other person is in the car with you and not on the phone. A person in the passenger seat can pause when the road requires your attention. A person on the phone can’t see when your attention gets diverted or the road conditions change.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

A Formula for Academic Papers: Introduction


The Introduction to a paper is a place for you to tell the story of the research that is presented. That story is not what you did to complete the research, but rather why the work is interesting. And while the research you are writing about in a paper might be part of a larger story (e.g., your thesis), the paper’s story is also not necessarily that larger story. Instead, it is the story that frames just the current work and its contributions as clearly as possible. The goal is to capture the reader’s attention, provide context for the included research, and set expectations for what is to come.

A simple, reliable Introduction outline is:

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Related Work: Ensemble


Ensemble: Exploring Complementary Strengths of Leaders and Crowds in Creative Collaboration
Joy Kim, Justin Cheng, Michael S. Bernstein
CSCW 2014

This paper looks at crowd-supported creative writing. It presents a system, called Ensemble, that supports structured creative writing. There are a number of examples of massively collaborative writing, including:
  • Ensemble: Structured creative writing, with the author leading crowd workers in the task.
  • The Collabowriters: An experiment in collaborative novel writing. Users write short sentence candidates for the next sentence in the novel, and then vote on which one is the best.
  • FoldingStory: A group storytelling game.
  • Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers: An experiment in collaborative academic writing by Bill Tomlinson and 29 others for alt.chi at CHI 2012.
  • Soylent: A crowd-powered word processor that uses Mechanical Turk workers to help writers proofread and shorten their document.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

100 Mile Walk Scheduled for July


Cale and I now have a date for our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf: July 18 - 27. Hotels have been booked, deposits have been paid, and I've filed for the time off from work.

Friday, March 14, 2014

100 Mile Walk: Day Three


[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

Looking at Day Three of Cale and my 100 mile journey, it seems relatively unexciting. We will follow the Pacific Highway for pretty much all of the 15 mile journey.

Start: Cedarbrook Lodge, 9:00am
End: Emerald Queen Hotel and Casino, 5:00pm
Total distance: 14.9 miles

Breakfast: Cedarbrook Lodge
Snack: Anywhere along the road
Lunch: Pac Island Grill
Dinner: Emerald Queen Hotel and Casino

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Microwork as a Way to Collaborate


Recently I have been exploring selfsourcing as a way to help someone perform a single large, overwhelming information tasks by breaking it down into hundreds of easy-to-perform microtasks. Many of the microtasks that make up our personal information tasks need to be completed by the task owner, because they require personal knowledge or context. But not all do. In this way, the approach makes it easy to share aspects of a task with others in a way that is not easy to do for traditional complex tasks. For example, if the process of creating a photobook is broken down into subtasks, different family members can perform these subtasks to create a coherent book. Likewise, multiple colleagues could simultaneously create a single presentation if the process allowed them to brainstorm ideas on a topic and labeling them in parallel.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Micro-Habits


In several posts recently, I have discussed the potential benefits of transforming personal information tasks into microtasks (called selfsourcing). It seems picking up habits can likewise be facilitated by transforming the desired behavior change into micro-habits.

According to B.J. Fogg (via an NPR report I listened to recently), there are three steps you should follow if you want to pick up a new habit:
  1. Small: Choose a habit to pick up that only take a few seconds to complete.
  2. Routine: Place this new micro-habit within an existing routine.
  3. Celebrate: Physically celebrate the completion of your new habit whenever you do it.

Friday, March 7, 2014

Formal Friday


Computer scientists are notoriously scruffy. Most days I wear jeans and a t-shirt to work. I've always taken this for granted, and never really thought much about what I wear. I get ready for work so fast in the morning that my children are awake, dressed, and eating breakfast before I even have to get out of bed. I put my clothes on while they put their shoes on so we can head out the door to drive to school. My sneakers are comfortable enough that I can spend all day walking at my treadmill desk, and nothing I wear needs special care in the wash. When I travel to conferences, I pack a week's worth of clothing in a small carryon backpack.

But not today!

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Attending a Conference without Children


For many years I had one or more of my four children with me whenever I attended an academic conference (in my arms, or in my tummy, or, quite often, in both). This inspired me to write about conference travel with children and how conferences might better support traveling mothers - but it has also, lately, lead to my being asked at every conference I attend: "Where are you children!?" Because I no longer bring them with me to conferences. This post is about why.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

WSDM 2014 Trip Report


Last week I attended the Seventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2014) in New York City. The conference hotel was located right in Times Square, and I enjoyed visiting Cornell Tech, eating delicious food, and catching up with college friends. I also enjoyed attending sessions. WSDM is single track, which means the research being presented isn’t always directly relevant to everyone, but conference attendees have a shared experience and get exposed to research they might not otherwise.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Making a Task Interruption-Friendly


We are interrupted every 11 minutes. We are interrupted by incoming email, the phone ringing, and colleagues stopping by our office. We even interrupt ourselves sometimes, to go read Facebook or browse the web. You very well may not make it through this post without an interruption. Research suggests that it is hard to recover from an interruption, with it taking us up to 15 minutes to return to focused activity. Given we are interrupted so often that we never achieve full efficiency, interruptions cause a significant loss in productivity.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Selfsourcing Example: Presentation Creation


In addition to playing around with the selfsourcing of photo organization, I am also building a desktop selfsourcing application to support brainstorming and create a presentation with the results. A slide from a selfsourced presentation (on the topic of selfsourcing) is shown above.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Selfsourcing Example: Photo Organization


People have amassed large archives of digital photographs that have significant value to them but are difficult to use because they lack structure. For example, I have thousands of pictures of my four boys that I never get to enjoy because they sit in an unorganized mess of flat folders labeled with dates. To help people make better use of their photographs, Dan Liebling and I are developing a mobile selfsourcing application that supports the creation of a photobook from an unorganized set of photographs. I can’t wait to use it!

Friday, February 21, 2014

CSCW 2014 Trip Report


CSCW 2014 in Baltimore, MD was a lot of fun. There was so much good work presented that I often had a hard time choosing which sessions to attend. However, the common themes I paid attention to while there were:

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Selfsourcing


Peer review is an important part of the scientific process. It is used to identify high quality research and establish norms and common practices within the scientific community. But it is also my least favorite part of my job. Reviewing seems to require long uninterrupted periods of effort to make meaningful progress, and it feels too overwhelming to get started unless I absolutely have to get the task done. I find it almost impossible to review an article without a deadline looming over my head.

You probably have tasks like this, too. Perhaps you find it hard to sit down to write a blog post, or to edit an academic article, or to make a scrapbook with the thousands of photos you’ve taken. The task is very important to you, but actually getting it done is almost impossible.

Good news: We can fix this!

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Related Work: TaskGenies


TaskGenies: Automatically Providing Action Plans Helps People Complete Tasks
Nicolas Kokkalis, Thomas Köhn, Johannes Huebner, Moontae Lee, Florian Schulze and Scott Klemmer
TOCHI, 20 (5): 2013.

The proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” is attributed to the sixth century BCE philosopher Laozi. People have attempted to accomplish large tasks by decomposing them into manageable parts for millennia, and modern approaches to time management continue to take Laozi’s words to heart. For example, agile software development breaks large, failure-prone software projects into smaller tasks with corresponding time estimates.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

100 Mile Walk: Day Two


[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

Day Two of our 100 mile journey is slated to be much longer than Day One. Our goal will be to walk from Bellevue all the way to the SeaTac airport. Bing Maps tells me it is only a 20 minute drive, but it will be a day-long walk for Cale and me.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

A Formula for Academic Papers: Authors


Chances are, as a computer scientist, you will write very few papers alone. Of all of the refereed conference papers that I have published, I have been sole author for only two. Instead, as the chart below shows, I am much more likely to publish papers that have three to five authors. Writing collaboratively creates interesting challenges and opportunities. This post focuses on your responsibilities as an author and how to work effectively with your co-authors.

100 Mile Walk: The First Leg


[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

The first leg of our 100 mile journey will probably the easiest - and is unquestionably the easiest to plan. The expected route is short and covers terrain we already know well. On the Friday we leave, I will come home from work a little early and hit the road with Cale by 4pm. We have been walking a lot recently, but I wonder if it will feel different to walk away from the house knowing we're not coming back? Perhaps we'll throw a bit of a bon voyage party to celebrate our departure with confetti and poppers.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Face-to-Face Social Interaction


Mobile devices allow us to connect with the rest of the world, regardless of where we are. People can now be reached anywhere. If something goes wrong at my kids’ school, for example, a teacher can let me know immediately, even if I’m in the middle of a meeting. People can also access information from anywhere. Before ordering dinner at a new restaurant, I can look the most popular dishes up on Yelp right from the table.

Ironically, however, while mobile devices connect us with the greater world, they often disengage us with what is directly around us. I know I have been guilty of pushing my children away while I catch up on one last email that could have easily waited. Mobile devices are so disruptive that we create rules to regulate their use (“No phones at the dinner table!”) and make up games to keep us away from our phones.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Preparing for a 100 Mile Walk


Although Cale and I won't start our walk to Great Wolf until this summer, we have already begun preparing. Mostly this has involved a lot of walking, although in a fit of whimsy I also ordered us calling cards (pictured above).

Monday, January 13, 2014

Laser Cutting and Wire Splicing


The transition back to work after the holidays can be hard, with rigorous pseudoscience declaring the first Monday back the most depressing day of the year. Lucky for me, I got to spend Blue Monday (and the rest of the week) having fun laser cutters and LED pixels with Chris, Shelly, Ivan, and Melissa.

Friday, January 3, 2014

Related Work: Measuring the Crowd Within



Measuring the Crowd Within: Probabilistic Representations Within Individuals
By Edward Vul and Harold Pashler
Psychological Science, 19(7): 2008.

Crowdsourcing researchers are familiar with the idea of the wisdom-of-crowds, whereby information from multiple different people can be pooled to produce a better outcome than any individual could produce alone. Vul and Pashler’s paper provides some fun common examples of wisdom-of-crowds in action, including:
This paper builds on the notion of the wisdom-of-crowds to ask: Can information collected multiple times from the same individual can also improve the outcome? The authors study this by asking participants to answer questions like, “What percentage of the world’s airports are in the United States?” twice. They find that when they average both answers they get a more accurate response than if they were to look at either answer individually.