Graduation 2007

This morning I graduated with my Ph.D. from ODU. Becky, Ethan, and I flew into Norfolk on Thurs for the ceremony (Michael Irvin was on our flight, but I wasn't able to get an autograph), and my parents and sister got into town on Fri.

Tony Snow gave the commencement speech and did a terrific job. He told the graduates that they needed to focus on two things: God and country. Everyone needed to answer the question of whether there is a God (Tony is convinced there is), what they're relationship is to Him, and what He expects of them. Second, they need to realize that we've got a fantastic country and find a way to make it even better. When hyping-up America, Tony said, "When there's a crisis, who does everyone turn to? Venezuela?" The guy sitting next to me thought it was one of the funniest things he'd heard in a while... he's Venezuelan.

After graduation we took some pics with Michael, my adviser, and then got some lunch a Fellini's. It's nice to be back in Norfolk... can't wait to see all my old friends.

Below are some pics from graduation:

On the flight to Norfolk	Walking down the aisle
Becky watching from a distance	With Michael afterword
With parents and Ethan	With Sara and Ethan
Celebrating at Fellini's	Congrats cake at Bayside

JCDL 2008 Call for Participation

The ACM IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2008) will be held in Pittsburgh, PA on June 18-20, 2008. I'm on the program committee this year and look forward to a great conference.

JCDL welcomes contributions from all fields that intersect to enable Digital Libraries. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Interfaces to information for novices and experts
• Information visualization
• Retrieval and browsing
• Data mining/extraction
• Enterprise-scale Information Architectures
• Distributed information systems
• Studies of information behavior and needs; user modeling
• Insightful analyses of existing systems
• Deployment of digital collections in education
• Digital Library curriculum development
• Systems and algorithms for preservation

A one page CFP is available on the website.

Ethan's first visit with Santa

Usually Ethan is really good about letting strangers hold him. But not this time. Sorry, Santa!

Ethan learns that's he's on the Naughty List.

Fav5

Only one week of finals before the semester is out! My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Good news for the CS majors: According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, computing-based jobs are expected to grow 24% over the next decade, the highest rate of growth of any "professional and related occupations."


2. Maybe the grass isn't greener on Mac's side of the fence.
   


3. Google has just released an impressive REST-based chart API. It allows 50K queries per day and allows you to create pie graphs, line graphs, scatterplots, bar charts, and Venn diagrams.
   
   Just for fun-- my Family League fantasy football record (8-5) as of today:
   
   
   


4. The Heritrix 2.0 web crawler is here. I'll be using this crawler (most likely) in my search engine class next semester.
   


5. The planet's latest enemies: divorced observers of Hanukkah. Wow... no one is safe blame these days.
   

Software development projects are complete

Three teams of seniors completed their Blockade implementations and installed them Sunday night in our Software Development Lab. So far I've had 26 user testers of various ages come by and tried out the games, and they've all been very impressed. You can see some snapshots of the games on our department website.

Sunday from 7-9pm in the Science lobby, we're having the Software Showcase. Each team will have a booth where they'll be showing-off their games. I'll announce the winner of the Acceptance Test and award plaques to the winning team. There will be lots of food, so come on out.

Update on 12/7/07:

Unfortunately, we are not having an AI Super Bowl this year as we have in past semesters. There was a small ambiguity in one of the rules that caused one team to implement their AI slightly different than the other 2 teams. This made it very difficult to pit two AIs against each other that made different assumptions. It's very unfortunately this ambiguity was not caught earlier, but live and learn.

Update on 12/10/07:

Congratulations to Nanosoft (Blockerman Redux) for their first place finish in the Acceptance Test. They placed first in the user tests and technical tests. All three teams did really well, and all the students are to be congratulated on their hard work.

Fav5

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

1. The academic community has shot themselves in the foot once again: Two researchers from UT Austin have written a paper showing how to de-anonymize the anonymous 100 million+ movie ratings Netflix made available to the public in 2006. While this is an impressive feat, it will likely make companies that have access to rich data sets much less likely to release them to researchers in the future. While this may be a positive thing for privacy advocates, it's certainly not for researchers. What these UT guys have done in effect is demonstrate why academia should not be trusted with data they desperately need to do their research.
   
   Update: A friend of mine emailed me about this issue and made some good points: Maybe Netflix should have offered some prize money to figure out how to properly release anonymized data. Also, researchers have an obligation to show how others might misuse "anonymous" data... companies making such data available to the public should show much more care in the future.
   


2. We're all carrying ticking time bombs in our pockets... UPDATE: Or maybe not.
   


3. More bad news for Microsoft: a recent benchmark test revealed XP was twice as fast as Vista. And in court, MS's marketing director was just as confused about what "Vista capable" means as the rest of us.
   


4. Philipp Lenssen has written an interesting article about Abstract vs Realistic Icons, making some really good points about how making icons more photo-realistic doesn't necessarily improve usability.
   


5. Colin N., a former CS student, emailed me about a new games contest sponsored by Microsoft for students. I'd like to change the was the CS software development class works by targeting this competition next year.

Final dissertation copies have made it to Virginia

I've finally got my dissertation approved by the Dean's office, and 6 copies on expensive cotton paper are now sitting in the CS office at ODU. Even though it seems like everything is taken care of, I still won't relax until I have my diploma in one hand and a hard-bound book entitled Lazy Preservation in my other. At least we've got one very kind and helpful secretary working in the CS department... I can't imagine how I could have gotten this taken care of from Arkansas without Phyllis' help.

Note to self: Next time make sure your dissertation's cover sheet which requires all your committee member's signatures is 100% correct before your committee flies back to their home states. Argh....

Dancing faculty elves

It's not every day you see the CS faculty dressed in tights and doing synchronized dancing. Thank you, Lauren (one of our seniors), for the laugh!

(The guy on the right doesn't look very happy, but he's got some serious moves!)

Fav5

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

1. A humorous take on What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? (Thanks to Mike Baur for sendimg me that one.)
   


2. While we're on the subject, Gmail now supports IMAP. That means you can now use email clients like Outlook and Firefox to access your Gmail without popping the emails off of Google's servers. Had Google supported IMAP several months ago when the Harding faculty was forced to switch to Gmail, it would have made many lives much easier. I was abile to get it to work with my harding.edu email address following the instructions and using user@harding.edu for the username.
   


3. If you like Google, Java, and mobile devices, you may want to give Android a shot. Reto Meier has written a little how-to on developing a person-mapping application with Android. Non-developers may not be quite so fascinated with Android.
   


4. Playing catch-up: an interesting article pointing to 12 research projects aimed at reducing spam.
   
   
5. Congrats to the Dallas Cowboys on a best-ever record of 10-1 after defeating the Jets 34-3 on Thanksgiving. Next victim: the 10-1 Green Bay Packers. Also congrats to the Razorbacks on an amazing win in triple overtime over the #1 ranked LSU Tigers. The Cowboys really need to draft McFadden next year...
   

I'm thankful for dairy products

My parents drove up for Thanksgiving last night and brought along some photos from my childhood. For those of you that know me really well, you'll get a kick out of these...

Frank eating cheese and crackers.

Frank eating buttered corn on the cob.

Ethan is almost 8 months old

It's been a while since I posted a bunch of Ethan photos, and I know many people check my blog just for the pics. So here are some from the past couple of months.

Hello there!	With Ashley
With Kelly	Not my happiest face...
Playing with Stacy	Asleep on grandma
With Brett Wiley	Ride 'em cowboy!
Celebrating Dad's birthday	Little ducky tastes like chicken!

More bandwidth at Harding

Harding has finally increased its Internet bandwidth capacity, from 40 Mbps to 80 Mbps... there are going to be a lot of happy students returning from their Thanksgiving break.

In the past month, accessing the Web was really frustrating. I would get a failed HTTP connection about half of the time. I was told YouTube made up 40% of Harding's Internet traffic!


Here's a graph of Harding's projected Internet bandwidth requirements over the next few years, thanks to IS&T. Guess our little fix is temporary. By 2010, we're all going to have problems anyway.


Update on 11/29/07:

Although Harding doubled its bandwidth, I still have frequent problems downloading pages. According to one of my sources, our needs are still exceeding our new limit. I guess its time to start capping enrollment.

Live from Dallas

I'm in Dallas where my dad and I met up to see the Cowboys take on the Redskins. This is the first Cowboys game I've seen in person in a few years (the last one was the Broncos vs. Cowboys game on Thanksgiving Day), and it proved to be quite an exciting one. Romo threw 4 TD passes, all to TO. But Washington's Campbell was looking pretty good. Somehow the Dallas defense held on to the 5 point lead, and the Cowboys are going into the Thanksgiving holiday with a 9-1 record. Whoo-hoo!

Fav5

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

1. Jury 101: If you're currently serving on a jury, don't blog about it.


2. Finally, a monitor which doesn't use power when in standby mode. What's the big deal? The British Government estimates 8% percent of all domestic electricity is consumed by devices in standby.


3. Interesting new Wikipedia research at the University of Minnesota: Only one-tenth of 1% of Wikipedia editors account for nearly half the content. And the probability that a user would view an article in a damaged state is 0.37%.


4. Cats: This is just weird. Almost as weird as this.
   Eggs: This is absolutely amazing.


5. Congrats to the Harding Bisons who defeated Arkansas Tech 62-55 at Homecoming and set a new Harding record for points scored in a game.
   

3 days of Halo 3

This past weekend I felt horrible. It actually started Wed night and didn't let up until Sun night. Fortunately, I had just purchased Halo 3 with some birthday money, and since I couldn't do much of anything else, I spent a good part of 3 down days playing Halo online with XBox Live.

It was a lot of fun, but a huge time-killer. Now I understand why so many of my students don't seem to have enough time to complete their assignments... Halo is eating up an enormous amount of their free time. It would be eating up my time too, but I decided to unplug the XBox and leave it in my office... I simply lack self-control in this area.

Fav5

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

1. Which Wikipedia articles are trustworthy? A new service called Veropia thinks they know. They are hoping to act as a warehouse for Wikipedia articles that are vetted by "experts."


2. Students at Saginaw Valley State University are building a video game in their spare time. Their role-playing game is a lot more involved than the board games we produce in our CS capstone class; they are enlisting help from 15-60 students and hoping to release their game in Nov 2008.


3. Does NBC's Pres Jeff Zucker really believe "Apple has destroyed the music business"? If anything, Apple should be heralded as the company that finally pulled the music industry out of the Dark Ages. Tone down the rhetoric, Zucker.


4. Google and an alliance of social network parters are releasing OpenSocial APIs, open services that allow social applications to be created on sites besides Facebook. Facebook has so far been excluded.


5. This is Harding's Homecoming weekend. Go Bisons!
   

Happy Halloween

From our little dragon to yours...

E-voting at Harding

Today is the first time students at Harding have ever been able to vote online in a student election. Although most schools have been doing this for a while, we haven't gotten with the program until recently. Kudos to Kevin Stewart (the Student Association's faculty sponsor) who got the ball rolling. The e-voting system was developed by three of our CS students under the direction of Gabriel Foust (a CS faculty member).

Fav5

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

1. According to the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology (CPST), Enrollment in bachelor's programs in computer science have dropped 40% from 2001 to 2006, with many students avoiding the field because of "increased risk of job loss due to offshoring and other issues." Unfortunately, we educators are not doing enough to recruit CS students, and many falsehoods continue to be circulated about job risk. In fact, now is one of the best times to be a CS major. The job market is very strong, and many predict that it will continue. Money Magazine recently ranked the top 10 professions, and 4 of the 10 can be fulfilled by CS majors!
   


2. This is pretty cool: You can now use the Sitemap Protocol to tell Google about source code housed on your website. This allows Google to improve the accuracy of its Google Code Search.


3. Congrats to Microsoft who beat out Google and Yahoo in a partnership deal with Facebook. It's tough to beat Google at anything these days.
   
   
4. Neil L. Waters writes an interesting piece in CACM entitled Why you can't cite Wikipedia in my class. This is something every student should read. You may not have the proper permissions to view the article, so I have temporarily placed it here.
   


5. My Colorado Rockies are down 0-2 in the World Series against the Red Sox. Here's hoping a return to Denver will bring back the magic.
   

Pledge Week and Insults

We're more than half way through Pledge Week here at Harding. This is the week when a majority of freshmen engage in a number of silly and time-consuming activities in order to become members of a social club (Harding's equivalent of sororities and fraternities). Most of the faculty dread this week because it means a significant number of our students will be missing class and not doing their homework. I moved a test back a week just because it landed on this week.

Before I left Harding to get my Ph.D., I was a sponsor for Knights, a club I was once a member of when I was a Harding student (here's a really old Knights website I used to maintain). Although I'm no longer a sponsor, I'm still glad to see the club going strong.

Today is the Knights joust, an event where the pledges try to smear shaving cream on each other using a long plastic pole. It sounds pretty ridiculous, but it's a lot of fun. I still remember what a blast it was 15 years ago (yes, I'm old) when I trotted out there in my aluminum foil-covered armor.

In the spirit of Pledge Week, when pledges are routinely subjected to insults, here are a few classics:

1. "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
   Oscar Wilde


2. "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
   Mae West


3. "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
   Forrest Tucker


4. "They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge."
   Thomas Brackett Reed


5. "He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
   John Bright


6. "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
   Oscar Wilde


7. "A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
   Winston Churchill

Update on 10/26/2007:

It's good to see some of my colleague's kids have joined Knights. I'm hoping Ethan will one day do the same although his mother, a former TNT queen, is trying to indoctrinate him into preferring blue over green.

Oh, if you are trying to access my old Knights website from inside the Harding firewall, you're out of luck. The Internet Archive is being blocked since its an "anonymizing utility". Blah.

One dissertation defense... check!

My defense this morning went really well, and I'm now a doctor (not the MD kind, so please don't bother me when you are having a heart attack). All I need to do now is make some minor corrections, and I'll be walking in December. I really appreciate all those who have sent me encouraging notes and called the past few days... your prayers have meant a lot to me.

I'm also really thankful to my mom who drove down from St. Louis in the rain to help out my wife while I was gone. Ethan can be a lot of work, especially when your back is shot and you're fighting a cold.

Here's a photo of Ethan with his Warrick t-shirt which I used on my final slide this morning. (Warrick is the name of my website reconstructor, part of my dissertation, and the t-shirt was a gift from Joan, my office-mate at ODU.) Can't wait to see my family again tomorrow!

Leaving for Norfolk

I'm headed to Norfolk in a few hours to defend my dissertation. Becky and Ethan are staying behind this time, but we're all making the trip in December for graduation.

Some people really hate to fly, but I'm actually looking forward to it. There's no better opportunity to either nap or read. I'm bringing along some really good reading material, and Ethan's multiple wakings last night has guaranteed I'll sleep well on the plane. Here's a sample of what I'll be reading on the plane:

• Mining the Web by Chakrabarti
• Google's PageRank and Beyond by Langville and Meyer
• Kingdom Come: Embracing the Spiritual Legacy of David Lipscomb and James Harding by Hicks and Valentine
• Newsweek
  

It just occurred to me that I'm going to have to change the subtitle on my blog since this dissertation is almost at a close. Any suggestions?

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 3 items of interest (it's a slow week, and I'm ready to go home):

1. The first Internet census since 1982 was just completed.


2. Researchers at Southampton University have developed a new search engine for images which relies on the content of the image rather than words appearing near it on a web page.


3. Today's my birthday. Yes, Kirk Cameron, Pavarotti and me were all born on Oct 12. If you're looking for a good gift to send me, I suggest one of these $100 laptops (that actually cost $200). Even better would be Halo 3. I'm actually playing Halo 3 for the first time Monday night with some students... should be a lot of fun.
   

Crawling behavior of Google, MSN, and Yahoo

Thanks, Marko, for sending me a link to this study analyzing the crawling behavior of the big three search engines. The experiment involved setting up a synthetic collection of web pages arranged as a binary search tree. They monitored the crawl log and performed search engine queries for a period of one year (2005-4-13 to 2006-4-13).

The photo below is a visualization of Yahoo's crawling behavior (Yahoo was the most active of the three crawlers). You can see an animation of the tree growing each day here.


We performed a similar experiment at ODU back in 2005 except we removed web pages every day from our collections to see how long they would stay cached by the search engines. And Joan, a fellow Ph.D. student at ODU who worked on the previous experiment, has been performing another experiment over the last several months with a very deep and wide collection of pages. (You can find links to the pages at the bottom-right corner of this page labeled Joan1-4).

What I found really interesting about this experiment was the methodology used to created the web pages. They altered the pages by appending the crawl log of the pages and allowing anyone (including spam bots) to make comments that appeared on the pages. This kept the page contents unique and changing to entice more crawls.

I really hope the authors of the study will submit their findings for publication in a peer-reviewed conference or journal.

Harding football on ESPN

In case you missed it, Harding was recently featured on ESPN's top 10 plays of the day. The footage, which ranked number 2 3, shows a Harding receiver catching a TD pass which deflected off of a defender and a fellow receiver. Good stuff.

One dissertation... check!

Yee-ha! I just completed my dissertation (at least temporarily) and emailed it off to my committee. I'll be defending Lazy Preservation: Reconstructing Websites from the Web Infrastructure two weeks from today at ODU. Of course there will likely be many minor revisions to make after the defense, but the hard part is finished. Praise God!

By the way, if any of you are having problems sleeping at night, I'll be happy to email you a copy of my dissertation.

Lectureship concludes today

The Harding University Lectureships concluded today. I haven't been able to attend much of it until today.

This morning, Mike Myers from the Littleton Church of Christ spoke in chapel and gave a keynote address before lunch. Mike was my youth minister growing up at Littleton, and he later became the pulpit minister. I haven't seen Mike in years, so it was really good to hear him speak. It brought back a lot of memories.

Mike talked about those times when we feel God isn't there. This was a very relevant topic for Mike: his mother had been suffering for several years from Alzheimer's and passed away just last week. It's at those dark times that God offers us a gleam of hope... we can be confident in knowing that He loves us, that He sent His son to die for us and knows what suffering is and that we have a chance to be with Him someday in the future.

Mike mentioned how the Colorado Rockies have been playing so well recently, even when everyone wrote them off at the beginning on the season. He even went so far to say they would win the World Series. When Howard Norton reminded Mike that he was in Cardinals country, Mike replied, "we all have sins we need to repent of. "

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.