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.