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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Happy Birthday Blog

The Slow Searching blog turns one today!

Most popular posts:

• Making the Marakon Ways (series)
• Attending a Conference with a Baby (series)
• Standardized Fame (series)
• A Formula for Academic Papers: Title and Abstract (series)

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.

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.