Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. This week Halo 3 debuted for the XBox 360, and by most accounts, it has met or exceeded expectations. I'm hoping to get a copy for my birthday next week.


2. Researchers at UC San Diego are working on a music search engine. They've developed a Listen Game which uses the wisdom of crowds to help.


3. Do you have difficulty identifying phish? Carnegie Mellon's Anti-Phishing Phil could help.
   


4. I want a tree house. Anyone know of a good place in Searcy to build one of these?


5. Almost half of IT workers surveyed said they have fallen asleep at their job. Big surprise. What is surprising is that 44% of male techies have said they've kissed a coworker. And I thought most tech geeks weren't very good with the ladies.
   

One week to go

My completed dissertation is due to my committee one week from today. As you can imagine, things are a little stressful, but I'm on target to complete it on time. I'll be defending three weeks from today on Oct 19. Please say a prayer for me if you get the chance.

"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." - Philippians 4:13

More Vista surprises

Can you guess what this is?
a) A beautiful piece of art work.
b) What the screen looks like when I'm up with Ethan at 5am.
c) Internet Explorer on crack.
d) All of the above.

The answer is D. I saw this marvelous window yesterday when IE decided it would no longer respond to commands. When I would minimize windows that were in front of the non-responsive IE window, it would leave a trail behind. For my GUI students, this is an excellent example of an application that is no longer processing paint messages. It's also an excellent example of why you hear me scream and kick my office wall periodically.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Evidence that studying really does matter: A recent study finds that college freshman who have a roommate with a video game console spent an average of 40 minutes less time studying per day than those freshman whose roommate did not have a game machine. They also scored 0.241 points lower (on a 4.0 scale) at the end of their first semester. It's not that the games were causing the students' minds to waste away... they were simply eating into the time the students would normally have spent studying.
   


2. The digital smiley face :-) turned 25 a few days ago. Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman claims to have been the first to use it in a computer message, and no one else has refuted that claim. Of course, proving you were the one to have invented the happy face is a difficult task; it would be rare for anyone to have access to a personal digital message from over 25 years ago.


3. Kudos to the New York Times who recognized the potential to greatly increase revenue by unlocking their subscription-based content to the public.
   


4. A Microsoft employee prematurely posted upcoming changes to Search Live on a blog. LiveSide caught it before it was pulled by MS.


5. And finally, Microsoft lost big in Europe: $700 million and some change.

Search engine class

It's official- I'll be teaching a class entitled "Search Engine Development" in the spring semester, COMP 475. The prerequisites are COMP 245 (Data Structures) and 250 (Internet Development I). This course will count as one the 3 electives required for the CS-BS degree or one of the 2 electives required for the CS-BA degree.

In this course we'll be learning how search engines like Google are able to return a relevant set of search results from the Web in milliseconds. The following topics will be covered:

• Web characterization
• History of web search
• Information retrieval (IR)
• Web crawling
• Deep web
• Content indexing
• Query processing
• Search results ranking (e.g., PageRank and HITS)
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Adversarial IR
• Personalization of search results

There will be several team projects utilizing open source software to build a search engine.

This course will be useful for anyone interested in doing research that could lead to presenting work at a major conference or in getting an internship at a search engine company.

The textbooks I'm currently looking at for this course include:

• Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings by Langville and Meyer
  


• Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data by Soumen Chakrabarti
  

If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know by leaving a comment.

Go Broncos!

Ethan and I decided last weekend to put on our Broncos gear and cheer them on against the Raiders. Apparently it did a world of good since the Raiders missed their chance at winning the game with a field goal kick in OT; the Broncos came back and kicked one for win.



Next weekend my parents will be visiting, so Ethan will be sporting his Cowboys outfit (his grandpa is a huge fan, and they're my second-favorite team).

p.s. Ethan won his first fantasy football game this weekend, beating his Uncle John 145-141. It helped having Chad Johnson who caught 2 TD passes and had 209 yards receiving.

Participate in ACM’s Mentoring Program

ACM has partnered with MentorNet to promote e-mentoring relationships between professionals and students in the areas of engineering, science and math. They are looking for students and professionals to be involved in the program. More information about the program is available here.

I highly recommend students get involved in this service; it will not only help you learn more about the profession you are about to enter, but it will also give you some contacts in the field which could be very valuable as it gets time to find an internship or graduate.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. This morning one of our senior computer science students did their senior seminar on Silverlight, a new web technology developed by Microsoft to enable .NET client-side programming on the Web. Like the Flash player, Silverlight first requires the engine to be downloaded and installed. I got it to work just fine with Firefox (although I hate restarting my browser, especially when I have 20 different pages open). This technology looks promising, especially if Microsoft really pushes hard for adoption. I wonder why they don't include it along with Flash in Vista? Maybe they're afraid of another bundling lawsuit.


2. One of the examples used in the Silverlight presentation was Microsoft's new search engine, Tafiti. Tafiti is powered by Live Search, but it uses Silverlight for it's interface. Tafiti is a perfect example of how a pretty interface does not necessarily make your application any more usable (see the tree of search results below for "Harding University").
   
   
   P.S. I noticed today (3 days after this post) that the Tafiti tree view screen was eating 25% of my CPU cycles! I opened another tree view window to view different results, and 50% of my CPU cycles were being used! So not only is the screen useless, it will also cause your computer to waste time and energy. Booo.
   


3. Google has recently improved their date range functionality on the advanced search. These improvements allow you to do things like, find the pages Google crawled from my blog within the past week.
   


4. And Google is offering $30 million to the first team able to send a robotic rover to the moon that is capable of roaming the surface and sending readings back to Earth. Of course accomplishing such a feat is going to cost much more than $30 million, but it's a nice gesture.
   
   
5. And just for fun: Sidesplitting tech comics.

Nokia 2610: The worst phone I've ever owned

When we moved from Virginia to Arkansas, we switched our cell phone service to AT&T. Of course our T-Mobile phones wouldn't work (what's up with that?), so we had to purchase new phones. Being the frugal couple people we are, we picked their least expensive phone, the Nokia 2610.

I find it hard to believe that this phone passed a thorough usability inspection (looks like I'm not alone). The arrow buttons are so narrow only a squirrel can press them, and the screen is totally unreadable when outside, even on a cloudy day. The default button shortcuts makes me think they just randomly chose from the set of options no one ever uses. Maybe it's the just the poor reception in this area, but the voice quality is pretty lousy as well.

The only positive thing is that it doesn't have stupid buttons on the side that accidentally get pressed when in my pocket, changing my ringer from vibrate to loud (thanks to Motorola for that exceptional design).

Sorry, but I'm just not in the best mood today. Maybe it's because I keep running into poorly designed technology that causes me to waste an exorbitant amount of time or just get angry. Here's just a few gripes:

• A few weeks ago I wasted 15 minutes trying to find the Print button in Office "let's-confuse-them-by-removing-the-menu" 2007. (At least I didn't have to figure out how to open the box.)
  
• Yesterday I rebooted my computer a dozen times because various software I installed said they "required" rebooting.
• Vista continues to ask me 10 times a day if I really meant to start a program or change a setting.
  
• iTunes won't play a purchased TV show on my brand-new computer without pausing every 2 seconds for 20-30 seconds at a time.
  
• I can't get my car to quit saying "Maintenance required" on the dash because it requires me to do the equivalent of saying the alphabet backwards while standing on my head underwater.
  
• And I keep hitting the panic button on my car door opener because some bozo thought they'd put the button right where by thumb needs to be when pressing the trunk button!

Argh...

Oh yeah, my dissertation is due 3 weeks from today, so I'm a little more uptight than usual.

It's Wednesday, September 12

According to Wikipedia, a number of historical events have taken place on this day:

• 2001 - Article V of the NATO agreement is invoked for only the second time (the other being in Bosnia) in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States of America.


• 1995 - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's All Star Team beats the Harlem Globetrotters 91-85, ending the Globetrotters' 24-year, 8,829-game winning streak.


• 1959 - Bonanza premiers. It's the first regularly-scheduled TV program presented in color.


• 490 BC - Athens defeats Persia at the Battle of Marathon

Today also marks the first annual Day of Encouragement. So give someone you know an extra dose of encouragement today.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Facebook has recently decided to allow search engines like Google to crawl their member pages to make them accessible to a much larger audience. For those that don't want their profile exposed to the world, Facebook provides an opt-out. This is a good move by Facebook that will likely draw in more members, and it will certainly be useful to social networking researchers.
   


2. While on the subject of Facebook, have you seen the Friend Wheel? It creates a graph of your friends and connects your friends who are friends with each other. A really dense graph means your friends are very cliquish. A sparse graph would mean you have friends from a very broad range of people. Looks like I'm somewhere in the middle:
   
   


3. The first Semantic Robot Vision Challenge was held in late July. The competition required robots to locate objects in a room by first utilizing the Internet to search for pictures of the objects. For example, if the robot had to find a pencil, it would first search Google Images for pencil and then, based on the results, attempt to locate something similar in the room. I've tried teaching Ethan what "sleep" is using a similar method, but he hasn't yet been able to locate it anywhere in his room.
   


4. An interesting paper popped up in arXiv this week: Open Access does not increase citations for research articles from The Astrophysical Journal. The authors conclude:
   

   There are a number of excellent arguments in favor of changing the scientific publication system to an open access model. The open access citation advantage is not one of them.

   Why doesn't making a paper OA increase its citations? The authors admit in the introduction:
   

   ...in a well funded field like astrophysics essentially everyone who is in a position to write research articles has full access to the literature.

   So, if everyone has paid access to everyone else's papers, there is no OA advantage. I don't think anyone would have thought otherwise. The problem is, most disciplines are not well-funded enough to provide everyone paid access to the literature, and hence the OA movement. So the conclusions reached by the authors seem trivial to me. Am I missing something?
   


5. Is Apple the next Microsoft (monopolist)? Dan Frakes doesn't think so.
   
   

Searcy is so fly

S-E-A-R-C-Y... we so cool you can't deny.

We've got some very talented Harding students (with a little too much time on their hands. )



By the way, Harding's fall enrollment is officially 6,332 students of which approximately 5,000 are attending the Searcy campus. Since Searcy is a town of approximately 20,000, that means every 1 in 5 people you run into at Wal-Mart is probably a Harding student.

Ethan is 5 months old

Our little man is growing up.

Yesterday he turned 5 months old. He's still a hit with the ladies:



but he's also learned some new tricks:


And now that football season is here, he's got his own fantasy football team, and we occasionally catch a few minutes of football when I'm not busy writing my dissertation:



Now if we can just get him to do a little more of this


at night, Becky and I may start catching up on all those lost hours of sleep.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Bad news for fans of The Office: NBC and Apple are bickering about the price Apple should pay for making NBC episodes available on iTunes. NBC episodes may no longer be available for downloading if something isn't worked out soon.


2. Happy times in Thailand: YouTube is back after a five month embargo. Now they'll be able to discover why 1 out of every 5 Americans can't find the US on a map.
   
   
3. How do you know if your programming code was illegally copied, especially when code obfuscating software makes it very difficult to detect? Try analyzing it's behavior instead with API Birthmark.


4. Top 5 Myths About Girls, Math and Science:
   
   
   
   1. From the time they start school, most girls are less interested in science than boys are.
      
   2. Classroom interventions that work to increase girls' interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) run the risk of turning off the boys.
      
   3. Science and math teachers are no longer biased toward their male students.
      
   4. When girls just aren't interested in science, parents can't do much to motivate them.
      
   5. At the college level, changing the STEM curriculum runs the risk of watering down important "sink or swim" coursework.
   
   


5. Yet another metasearch engine, this time for news: allonenews.com. From the site: "search 1800 news engines from 200 countries".
   

Something encouraging (and something not)

This morning in chapel, Andrew Baker announced a Day of Encouragement to be held on September 12, 2007. From the website:

The idea for a National Day of Encouragement began in June 2007 with high school students at the National Leadership Forum in Searcy, AR. The students broke into groups and discussed what they believed to be the biggest problem facing today's high school students. The groups came up with the usual answers — alcohol, drugs and violence — but one group surprised everyone with their answer. They said that the lack of encouragement was the biggest problem, not just in their schools but also in society. When asked how they thought the problem could be dealt with, one high school senior suggested having an official Day of Encouragement. Since then, the Institute for Church & Family formed a committee to develop a Day of Encouragement. It is our goal the people all across the nation will spend a little extra time encouraging on this day. It doesn’t take much. It can be a kind word or a simple note to encourage someone. We are encouraging people everywhere to get together with friends from school, places of worship, community organizations and family to do something that encourages other people.

The Institute for Church & Family is also trying to get the day nationally recognized, and according to their blog, they may be making some progress. I'm not sure if encouragement would have changed the events of 9/11 or the VT massacre (maybe discouragement would have been more effective), but I admire the goal of getting people to encourage each other more often.

And not so encouraging... I caught a commercial the other night for the Cheaters Detective Agency for Little Rock. It featured a man in his office telling his wife over the phone that he was going to be working late; later he meets up with a cute blond, and together they laugh about deceiving his wife. Talk about a depressing commercial and a poor way to drum-up business.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. When you make a closed system, you are basically inviting every hacker out there to break it open. Just a few days ago, some college-bound kid posted on his blog how to "unlock" the iPhone (use another cell phone provider besides AT&T). Wish Apple would have saved him the trouble in the first place.
   


2. This is a little odd: The Perverted Justice group is calling Wikipedia a "Corporate Sex Offender". Apparently someone from PJ was getting a little out of hand on Wikipedia and got banned and is now overreacting. What in the world is a corporate sex offender anyway?


3. Researchers at MIT have developed a clutter detector, a method for reducing the clutter from visual displays. My wife would love to have one of these for the house.


4. Here's something my wife would really love: an automated essay grading system.


5. Justice is finally served: Linux felon forced to install Windows.
   

No singles here

A single female friend of mine recently pointed me to this Oct. 2006 article in the Wall Street Journal: America, Up Close and Personal. The WSJ tabulated data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey to determine (among other things) the 10 counties with the most and the fewest singles.

According to the data, White County, home to Searcy, AR, tops the nation as the county with the fewest percentage of single men: 17.8%. Why so few single men? Here's a quote from the article:

Come high-school graduation, White County, Ark., -- where only 17.8% of the men and 17.6% of the women are unmarried -- sees a steady stream of young weddings, according to Mayor Belinda LaForce of Searcy, the county seat. At nearby Harding University, a Christian liberal arts institution, it is not uncommon for students to marry in the middle of their undergraduate careers.

Why exactly is Harding mentioned? First off, it is not common for students to be married. According to Marty Spears, Assistant VP for Academic Affairs, only 8% of all Harding undergrads are married. Second, a vast majority of Harding students are not from White County and would not be included in the White County census data. Sounds like a red herring to me.

I think the next two statements from the article indicate the primarily reasons for such a low percentage of unmarried men:

"We are a Southern community and a very faith-based community," says Ms. LaForce. Twenty-seven percent of the (White County) population has only a high-school degree, and just 6% of the population has completed a bachelors degree, which is 21 percentage points lower than the national average.

Although Searcy likely has a much higher population of college graduates than the national average, White County is primarily a rural area with lots of farms; a college degree is not necessary for a majority of farm work. And if a man doesn't go to college, he is more likely to start a family. Additionally, living together before being married is frowned upon in an area that is largely Christian, so there is even more of a motivation to marry.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Have you heard of MyDeathSpace.com? It archives the MySpace page of those who die. A little morbid, but interesting nonetheless.


2. American Airlines doesn't like it that Google allows others to compete for the words "american airlines" when they do a search. I'm siding with Google on this one.


3. Some Wikipedia entries were edited by users on CIA and FBI computers about topics that the FBI and CIA probably know more about than anyone else. Wikipedia says it violates their neutrality guidelines. I say give me a break.
   


4. There's an interesting article in Information Week about the future of web search technologies.


5. Who would have guessed? Swapping votes over the Internet is legal.
   

It's about to begin...

The 2007-2008 school year is almost here. The freshman have arrived as well as many upperclassmen, and the campus is starting to come alive. Monday classes begin!

I've spent the last couple of weeks getting ready for classes and re-adjusting to faculty life. Yesterday I attended the pre-session conference entitled "Our Vision for 2008-2013". After the conference, Becky and I joined the rest of the faculty and their spouses for an evening dinner where Don England and Nathan Guy gave excellent keynote talks. We left Ethan at home with his cousin Anna (it's nice having some family around) and enjoyed our evening out. Although I had being seeing all my old friends all week, it was the first time Becky got to see many of her old colleagues.

This semester I'm teaching two sections of Introduction to Programming (COMP 150), GUI Programming, and the senior capstone course Software Development Project. And I'm completing my dissertation which I'll be defending in mid-Oct. Too much on my plate? Yes, but it's gotta be done.

In my Intro and GUI classes, I'm doing something a little different this time: I'm allowing students to pair-up on their big assignments. But, they must work completely together on the same computer, each must write approximately half the code, and all of their time must be accounted for. I'm hoping this change will benefit some students who learn better in this type of environment as was seen in experiments by McDowell et al. It will be interesting to see how many students choose to do pair programming vs. working on their own.

For Soft Dev, I've chosen the 1970s game Blockade. This was a personal favorite of mine growing up, and the recent award winning game Quoridor is based on it. I haven't been able to find a computer implementation of Blockade, and purchasing the game is nearly impossible, so I developed my own game board which someone can print out and play on a piece of paper. I also modified the rules just a little... each team is given a single bomb that can be used at any time to blow-up a single section of a wall. The bomb enhancement is going to make developing an AI more difficult, but it also adds an interesting twist to the game.

How do you resolve marital conflict?

Becky and I prefer boxing, Wii style:


Thanks to Stacey and other friends for making us feel back at home. It's almost like we never left!