Wikipedia is fun

I've been on a big Wikipedia-reading kick lately. I think it started when Catherine started asking me about Hinduism, and all I really knew was that Krishna stole butter and ate it and killed a serpent in the lake. Today, for kicks, I looked up "water sports", which was disambiguated into the secondary definition of Urolagnia. I feel much more educated after reading up on this topic. The one thing that worries me most about Wikipedia is the stories I've heard about people who made subtle alterations to pages, changing, say, the number of home runs of some obscure baseball player, and have had it gone unnoticed (despite general success in identifying vandalism). I like the idea of editors - maybe they could periodically mark release branches, just like in code development. Speaking of Wikipedia, the live recent changes feed is slick.

Funny

I would never do this.

Home

Blogging on my parents' new wireless network (courtesy moi). After a week at home, the one thing I miss most about work is Diet Coke. Luckily, I had some today. Home's been very fun. And warm! Basketball, the beach, parties. It's feels odd to have people you see exactly once a year. Everyone (i.e. Josh and Charles) has a blog! Driving is kind of fun if you do it infrequently enough. Cranium is awesome! (Spelling questions are best answered sober, though.) Apples to Apples is mysterious, but easily won with the "Driving off a cliff" card. Firefly is addictive.

As an aside (as if this all weren't!), this Dilbert really captures how I felt when I first moved to Boston. (Good find, Richard):


Leaving now to watch more Jeopardy (boy has my trivia brain atrophied) and erase comment spam.

Yes, I've been delinquent

So much has been going on, I've had no time to write about it. Working backwards, more or less. Ben Franklin documentary on History Channel, Ben as a playa. Bronx Zoo at night - tigers and sea lions and camels eating, reptiles sleeping, baby capuchin monkeys breastfeeding, reindeer locking horns. Fun, if pricey. A better deal if you get in during the day - it's almost the same price. Also, the entrance closest to the subway is closed at night. Oops. Before that, Scrabble. Good find: 2 letter and 3 letter words with definitions! Google holiday party - too much booze - why did they have to have it on a Thursday? Incredibles and Kinsey (really liked Kinsey, sad how little religious conservatives have progressed in accepting human nature). Finished Oryx and Crake (Catherine thinks it's faux-deep, but I enjoyed it. Anyone want to discuss the ending?) Still hunting for decent Indian food in this city. Fun Thanksgiving at Catherine's (precarious hike in the rain at night, arcane card games, suburbia, Trading Spaces, good food). New sweater, new duvet cover, new couch. The Game. The only thing sadder than Yale on the field was Harvard charging for tailgates(!).

More debate text analysis

I was reading old stuff in Bloglines, and ran across Cameron's toys for looking at the debate transcripts.

Purple proportional map!

Thanks to a pointer from danah: purple proportional map.

Still catching up after Chicago...

I had a fun trip to CSCW in Chicago, especially since I snuck in some time to go on an awesome architecture tour and see jazz.

My talk apparently went well (thanks danah!) although a mid-talk crash led me to forget to show off the topic clustering and similarity coloring that constituted the text analytics. We also got some good questions about the possibility of shared read wear and user profiling.

I'm still sorting through my notes on what I saw and reading through papers. There wasn't anything that really blew me out of the water, although the session on backchannels was interesting and exhausting (I like the idea of augmented classrooms), Barry Wellman was entertaining, and the brief discussion of IDiag was intriguing. The idea of Wikilens was also interesting, and the sessions on software develoment, cultural issues in face-to-face collaboration, and organizational issues rang true. Cliff explained how e2 was supposed to work to me (and gave me some explanations of Slashdot's moderation system). He also pointed me to Susan Herring's work comparing e2 to wikipedia.

Some interesting ways of organizing things: McGrath on ROI, Quentin Jones on wireless. Good explanations of acquiring common ground in different environments. Cool demo of CoWord.

Frankly, commiseration over the election really impeded discussions about collaboration. Larry Lessig, in an awesome-if-generic closing plenary fused the two with his mention of opt-in communities, but didn't really offer any solutions. He did repeatedly mention the book republic.com. Maybe I should read it.