Meg’s Blog

App Inventor for Android  And An Unfortunate Truth

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:04:27 -0700

Tomorrow is my last day as an intern at Google. It has really been a fantastic time, and I’ve met a lot of really great people I hope to work with again in the future. I plan on writing a longer blog post about my internship experience soon, but for now I’d like to write a little bit about App Inventor for Android, a project I’ve worked closely with this summer.

In July, Google publicly announced their beta release of App Inventor for Android, a visual programming platform for programming applications on Android devices. App Inventor makes use of the Open Blocks Java library and is closely related in design and implementation to Scratch. The goal of the App Inventor for Android project has been similar to the goals of Scratch, that is to help novices learn about programming. Additionally, the App Inventor project has sought to leverage the popularity of mobile phones to meet this goal.

Soon after the App Inventor for Android project was publicly announced, there were a number of media responses. The first of which, was an article in the New York Times titled “Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software” by Steve Lohr (July, 2010). App Inventor was touted as not only a tool for educating students about programming, but as a way to bring “software development to the masses”.

One month after the public announcement, the New York times published another article about App Inventor for Android, titled “D.I.Y. Tool for Apps Needs Work” (August, 2010). In this article, David Pogue describes his own experience using App Inventor and claims that the potential for App Inventor has been “over-hyped”. Pogue claims that nonprogrammers would have difficulty making anything with App Inventor if they didn’t have the help of a friend or spend a significant amount of time learning more about programming.

Pogue’s assessment of App Inventor for Android, while somewhat scathing, is actually quite accurate. His reported experiences actually coincide with the App Inventor project’s goals: that by working with App Inventor, users will actually learn about programming. Pogue concludes his article by stating that App Inventor and tools like it (Hyper Card, Automator, and Scratch) have never delivered their promise of “idiot-proof, drag-and-drop software-creation.” Really, Pogue has just encountered an unfortunate truth : in order to program, you have to learn how to program.

Transition from iPhone to Android : Meg’s favorite droid apps

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:32:36 -0700

There are a lot of things going on in my life : Internship at Google, Wes getting a full-time job at Google, moving to CA, having to go back to Blacksburg without my husband until I finish my PhD, working on my dissertation....etc. Life is crazy, and I’m really stressed. Also, I have been horrible about blogging about all of these experiences. However, one itsy bitsy change in my life has been a switch from iPhone to Android. So I figure I’ll start with a blog post on that and work my way to the bigger life changes as I go.
Why we switched from iPhones to Androids:
Wes and I both got the iPhone 3G phones when they came out two years ago. This involved a switch to smart-phones from our previous non-smart phones, and a switch to AT&T from Verizon. Lately our iPhones had gotten ridiculously slow and frustrating to use (as two year old phones often do), and AT&T has horrible coverage where we are living now in Mountain View, CA. So a change was needed. Since we didn’t want to use AT&T anymore, we just had to switch away from iPhone. (No hard feelings Apple, we still love our macs!) Also, since we are both Googlers now (him for the foreseeable future, me for the next two weeks) we decided to support the home team and go with Android. The resulting purchase was with T-Mobile (awesome coverage here) and the Samsung Vibrant (aka. Galaxy S).
Things I love about my new Android:
1.) You can run apps in the background - I love that I can have facebook, twitter, or some other app downloading the new updates, switch over to check my email or some other task, and switch back to the apps I left loading and everything is ready for me.
2.) More apps are free - several of the apps I paid $0.99 on iPhone are for free on Android. I attribute this to the low cost for developers to get their apps to the market. Actually, I’ve nearly replaced all of the apps I used to have on my iPhone on my Android without paying a penny yet.
3.) I can use App Inventor! - As many of you know, I’ve been working with the App Inventor team at Google this summer, and I love making silly and stupid apps for my personal amusement. Now I can have my very own (and very cheesy) “Draw on Marbles” app on my personal phone. (Marbles is my cat, in case you didn’t know.)
4.) Customizable backgrounds, widgets, and UI - with the Android you can customize your background with static or “live” backgrounds, change the UI with different launchers (I hear LauncherPro is a good one), and include different widgets for fast news, weather, or social updates.
Things I miss about my iPhone:
1.) Finding quality apps easily - the Android market is okay, but the App Store just seemed to be easier to search through and find nice apps on. I’ve actually been searching for good Android apps online before I go look for them specifically in the market.
2.) Easy syncing with my mac - the iPhone would automatically sync up my calendar and music with my mac every time I connected it. Now I have to sync up a lot of my files manually, since the Android just comes up as an external drive when I connect it to my laptop. (UPDATE: After posting this on my blog my good friend Bob Lilly recommended DoubleTwist to me. My syncing woes are over! Hooray!)
3.) Some of my favorite apps aren’t on the Android - Specifically, the The Best Camera app and the Groundspeak Geocaching app are not available on Android. I’m making do with some poor substitutes but I hope they release Android versions soon!
Favorite Android Apps so far (and are also all free):
For Geocaching - c:geo - Like I said, I paid good money ($7.99!!) for the Groundspeak Geocaching app on my iPhone. It was by far the best geocaching app I’ve used so far. But a close approximation on the Android is c:geo. C:geo is free and has all the same features as the Groundspeak app, but it could definitely use an interface redesign and better functionality for logging visits to geocaches.
For Managing To-Do Lists - Astrid Tasks: I love a good to-do list. Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I make a to-do list. Astrid Tasks lets you enter your to-do list items with priority levels, due dates, and additional notes. It’s a no fuss, nice UI, to-do list manager.
For Managing Grocery Lists - Grocery IQ: I am very happy that the grocery list app I had on my iPhone is available for free on my Android - Grocery IQ. It keeps track of your lists for multiple types of stores, saves your favorite products, and keeps track of your purchasing history.
For Calculating Tips - Tippy Tipper: For some reason, I am horrible at calculating tips. I got a minor in mathematics and straight A’s in all my calculus classes, but calculating 18% of a total is an error prone process for me. So I just use Tippy Tipper - simple, easy to use, easy to adjust, tip and total calculator.
For Looking Up Movie Times - Flixster: I used to have the Fandango app, but I find the Flixster app much better for finding movies at your local movie theatre. You can keep track of your favorite theaters, locate the closest one to you, or search for theaters showing a particular move you want to see.
For looking up nearby points of interest - Places: Places is an app just released with the latest update of Maps by Google. Places makes it way easy to search for nearby points of interest like restaurants, museums, bars, ATMs, and everything else you may want to find.
Some other cool apps I enjoy playing with are Google Sky Map, Google Earth, Goggles, and Layar. Also, I haven’t used the new Voice Commands app but I’m looking forward to playing with it. As I start playing with my phone more, I’m sure I’ll find other ones that are useful and interesting. Anyone have Android apps to recommend? Feel free to email me with your suggestions, or mention them on twitter addressed to @megak.

Change in the air...

Tue, 1 Jun 2010 15:02:14 -0700

I am right now sitting in a Star Bucks in Mountain View California waiting for Wes to finish his on-site interviews with Google. Once he’s done we’ll start working on the things I need for the summer here, since I’ll be a Googler myself for a summer internship. A lot of fantastic things have been happening the past few weeks, so let me stop and reflect on a few.
Papers and Conferences
I submitted two papers (one paper, one note) to the GROUP 2010 conference and I’m a co-author on a journal paper my adviser and I submitted to a special issue on Feminism in HCI. I also found out that the panel proposal I submitted to the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration was accepted. The panel is titled “Building Bridges and Breaking Barriers: Panel on Diversity and Inclusion in CS Education.” The panel idea grew out of some experiences I had as a GTA and following discussion on the Systers email list. I am really *really* happy that some of my more frustrating observations of classroom climate and instruction have been funneled into a productive conversation about CS education and pedagogy. Nothing like seeing a world you’re not quite fond of to inspire you to take steps to change it! Hopefully this panel will serve as a launching pad for further conversation about what CS classrooms should look and feel like.
Birthday
On May 20th I had another birthday. I am now 27 years old. I don’t know how I feel about being 27 years old. It seems like 27 year olds should be in a pretty stable place in their lives and well established in the “adult” world of working, living, and making money. I’m still a student! (If you total it all up, I’ve been a student for 22 years now...) I’m getting close to the end though. That PhD is within sight! I swear!
My birthday was lovely though. As per tradition now, I had my friends over for breakfast. I made stacks and stacks of pancakes and we all partook of a few mimosas. (The picture above is of my Birthday flowers, given to me by Jeremy Archuleta.)That evening some friends were able to join me for margaritas at one of my favorite restaurants, Cabo Fish Taco.
Internship
So like I said, I’ll be spending the summer in California working for Google. It all came together about 2 weeks ago. I went from the possibility of finding lifeguarding jobs in Blacksburg to definitely working at Google in California in the span of 4 days. It was a whirlwind of phone interviews and paper work, and it seems amazing that I’m actually here. Do you know how many times I have applied to work at Google?!? Like, 20 times. Well not really 20, but seriously, Google and I have gone back and forth way too many times. This time I prevailed!
Tomorrow is my big internship orientation, but I snuck onto the Googleplex campus today to visit with my mentors Peter Norvig and Elin Pedersen. It turns out that Peter will actually be my “boss” for the summer and I’ll be working on a couple of his projects, but Elin says she still wants to be my mentor and involved with my work. I’m very honored and excited to be working with both of them :) I think if I can sink my teeth into a project here I should really be able to do something worth talking about in the next 12 weeks. Every possible project we discussed today had potential.
The Future
Also, like I said above, Wes is in California for two days and is currently completing his on-site interview with Google. Wouldn’t it be exciting if Wes got a job here? That would certainly mean that Mountain View, CA would be our next “place”, the next place we land for awhile after Blacksburg and Virginia Tech. Of course, at the end of the summer I will be going back to Blacksburg to finish that pesky PhD. That might mean leaving Wes for a little while if he gets the job, but we are both so excited about the future.
....Just got a call from Wes. He’s done with his interviews. Time to go get ready for the next big thing!

Gender, Bodies, & Technology

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 15:03:51 -0700

Today I participated in the Gender, Bodies, & Technology conference, held in Roanoke, VA, and organized by the Women’s and Gender Studies program here at Virginia Tech. The purpose of the conference, was to bring together those who want to “interrogate, celebrate, theorize, satirize, and otherwise engage the rich and manifold ways that embodiment, gender, and technology are implicated in each others’ constructions and meanings.” This was the first time this particular conference was held, and it was relatively small with a total of 135 participants. However, the size of the conference was actually a feature, in my opinion, since it allowed for more intimate talks and conversations, as opposed to oppressively large and intimidating audiences.
I was part of a four person panel, led by my adviser, Deborah Tatar, called the “Design of Control”. Each of the panelists discussed the design and use of technologies that were built as cultural probes to observe coordination and micro-coordination processes. Each of the technologies presented, ThoughtSwap (which I presented), PlaceMark (presented by Steve Harrison), TeamSudoku (presented by Joon S. Lee), and Digidrummer (presented by Bobby Beaton) deliberately leave control structures out of the technology, and therefore put the burden of coordination and control completely in the social space.
I think our panel was a success, and we each gave nice presentations that raised a lot of questions and participation from our audience. (I even gave out my business card to a few people who want to use ThoughtSwap in their classes.) However, I would like to report here on a few presentations that I thought were excellent, and may influence my thinking in the future.
“Changing Gendered Divisions of Labor in Labor”, presented by Petra Jonvallen
Dr. Petra Jonvallen, from Luleá University of Technology in Sweden, gave a presentation of ethnographies she conducted surrounding two new technologies used in Scandinavian maternity wards. The technologies she investigated are called “STAN” and “Milou”, and roughly speaking, they are used in maternity wards to monitor the mother’s contractions and the fetus heartbeat throughout labor. The difference between these systems and similar systems used since the 70’s, is that there are digital monitors placed in casual places, such as the lunch room and doctor/nurse break rooms. This new feature, allowed the doctors to monitor several patients at once in more casual places. When something was going wrong in the labor room, they could see it, and go to intervene in time.
While these technologies seem ideal, their use led to some unexpected consequences. First, by having monitors outside of the patients rooms, this meant that doctors and midwives didn’t need to spend as much time in the rooms with the to-be mothers to monitor their progress. In hospital terms, this made the doctors and midwives “more efficient” in the use of their time, but this pushed other duties usually performed by the midwives to the men, or soon-to-be fathers, that accompanied the soon-to-be mothers. These tasks include getting water or ice, massaging sore backs, and giving reassurance.
Dr. Jonvallen also discussed how midwives are usually in charge of the “normal” births, while doctors were in charge of the abnormal or “pathological” births. Usually, when a normal birth started becoming suspicious or worrisome, the midwives would be in charge of contacting the doctors. Thus, the midwives were the point of negotiation between “natural” births and births that require surgical intervention. With “STAN” or “Milou”, doctors began casually monitoring different soon-to-be mothers, and instead of waiting for a midwife’s call, they would just intervene as they felt necessary. This point of negotiation, and part of the midwives duties, changed, for better or for worse.
“Gendered Bodies/Gendered Place: Urban Hotels and Segregated Hotels”, presented by Carla Corroto
In a session titled “Technologies in Surveillance and Policing”, Dr. Carla Corroto, from Radford University, presented her survey of public media and the rising popularity of “women only” hotel floors in urban areas. She said that she got the idea for the study when she read an article in USA today that said more females were becoming business travelers, and as such, female only hotel floors were gaining popularity. Dr. Corroto is a practicing architect, and the idea of hotel rooms designed for women interested her.
The design of such hotel floors focussed on increased security, boasting such features as private side entrances, camera surveillance in all public areas, female only staff, and guarantees that no men would be on the floor. (If you stayed on the female only floor, you would not be allowed to bring men to your hotel room.) Several hotels even said they have elevators specifically designed for women, which included more surveillance, floral wall coverings, and abnormally large buttons. (For some reason, women need bigger buttons?) While security was the main concern for these hotel floors, the rooms would also be stocked with “girly” extras such as Cosmo magazines, larger make-up mirrors, and extra-powerful hair dryers.
The overwhelming message was that women, traveling alone, wanted security foremost and luxury as a bonus. Suggested by this design is that women traveling alone are concerned about being followed, being watched, being attacked by an “outsider”. This is despite the statistics suggesting that when women are attacked, they are usually attacked by someone who is close to them, that they would know or trust. (Turning to surveillance though means that the women in these special floors would be watched by “outsiders” even more.) Also, the luxury being offered in these rooms were certainly promoting or furthering ideas about women desires and dispositions. Did I mention that these special women-only rooms always cost significantly more than standard rooms? Dr. Corroto is studying how these rooms are designed, advertised, and discussed in popular media to uncover the assumptions made about women traveling alone, and how the popularity of these special hotel rooms are changing women’s feelings about traveling alone and their safety.
Concluding Remarks
While I was listening to these talks, I couldn’t help but wish that there were more talks like these at CHI, CSCW, and the other predominant conferences attended by the HCI community. Technologies are not neutral. They encapsulate values, and their use can change the social “unofficial” processes that are important but usually take place in the background. There is an upcoming special issue of Interacting with Computers called “Feminism and HCI” that my fellow panelists and I hope to contribute to. I hope that this marks the start of a trend in HCI : to view systems as more than just single goal, single consequence entities, but rather artifacts in cultures, entangled in the “webs of significance” men and women spin about themselves.

Research Dreams Do Come True

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 20:14:09 -0700

Last night I was walking around with one of my committee members, Steve Harrison, and we decided to get dinner and talk strategy about our upcoming presentations at the Gender, Bodies, and Technology conference in a few weeks. As we were walking out of the hotel he said, “Lucy would love to have this conversation with us.” The Lucy he was referring to is none other than Lucy Suchman, the author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (of which, I have an autographed copy), and this year’s winner of the “Lifetime Research Award”. (She is certainly one of my research-heroes.) Steve and Lucy had worked together during the golden era of Xerox Parc.
So Steve and I walked back to the hotel and went “Lucy hunting”. While we were walking around, we ran into Elin Pedersen from Google Research. (Elin is another alumni of Xerox Parc.) Elin and I have had many conversations about possible internship opportunities, and we were able to rekindle that conversation. It turns out Elin had already made dinner plans with Lucy, and we were welcome to join them.
Well, Lucy is a pretty popular person, as you can imagine, so as soon as we had started talking about dinner with her, other CHI attendees came up to meet and greet with her. Also, Lucy wanted to see what the conference reception was about, and talk with a few more people, before stepping out to dinner.
If you would like to meet some famous people in the field, then hanging out with Lucy, Steve, and Elin is certainly not a bad way to go about it. We were joined in conversation by Pheobe Sengers, John Tang, Paul Dourish, and another one of my research heros - Paul Luff. I had met Christian Heath and Paul Luff (authors of “Collaboration and Control: Crisis Management and Multimedia Technology in the London Underground”, as well as other seminal work) at last year’s CHI in Boston, however, when we were introduced I misheard their names, and didn’t realize I was talking to *the* Heath and Luff. Last night I was quick to make my apologies, and to express my appreciation of their work. I hope I run into him again so I can ask him a few questions.
Eventually, Steve, Lucy, Elin, and I made our way to dinner, where we drank some wine and talked about anything and everything till we got kicked out of the restaurant at closing time. It was fantastic. The conversation was serious about the future and humorous about the past. Whatever goals I had for attending CHI this year was eclipsed by such a lovely experience...and I’m not going home till Thursday!

CHIMe Workshop

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:09:50 -0700

CHI 2010 is just getting underway here in Atlanta, and I had the honor of participating in the CHIMe workshop before the official conference really got started.
CHIMe stands for “CHI-Mentoring” and the workshop was organized by Ron Metoyer from Oregon State University, and one of my committee members, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones from Virginia Tech. We also got to hear from guest speakers from academia and industry, including, Mary Czerwinski from Microsoft Research, James Foley from Georgia Tech, Mary Beth Rosson from Penn State, Jason Ellis from IBM Research, Diane Kelly from UNC-Chapel Hill, and many more.
The purpose of the mentoring workshop was to connect students from underrepresented groups in the CHI community with each other and potential mentors in the field. On the first day of the workshop we spent the morning and afternoon talking about the differences in working for academia and industry, work-life balance, and the different forms of research questions, studies, and evaluations. My favorite talk from the day was from James Foley, who discussed his love of working with students, the academic life, and the history of HCI. In particular he said that “My students’ success is my success”, and that in academia you really have the opportunity to inspire and observe creative minds. Also, in his presentation he showed us how HCI has moved from “one human, one computer” models of interaction to a broader sense of “human-centered computing” where really we think of human thought and needs at the center of our purpose in design.
The second day of the workshop was centered more on particular research projects and areas. Heather Lipford, from UNC-Charlotte, discussed the design of privacy tools for social networks, Jeffrey Heer, from Stanford, discussed information visualization, and Diane Kelly, from UNC-Chapel Hill, discussed her work in interactive search and retrieval. My favorite talk of the day was by Jason Ellis, in the Social Computing lab at IBM Research. He discussed how we can design tools for the “other 90%” at a profit, for the betterment of communities, people, HCI, and industry. The “other 90%” refers to the 90% of the world for that does not have the ability to use and purchase the majority of technologies out there today. Jason’s group has spent time in India, Africa, and the USA observing people’s use of technology, mobile phones in particular, and designing tools that they would actually be able to use. Some of the problems faced by the world’s poor is low income and income that is unsteady, unreliable access to electricity, and other environmental and societal factors that hinder their mobility and health.
After the last talk on Saturday there was a CHIMe poster session, where I presented a poster on my dissertation work, called “Classroom resources and impact on learning”. All of the CHIMe participants were there, and other CHI participants were milling around as well. We all got a chance to network, network, network before CHI even officially started. I’d say CHIMe was a success, and I hope it will become a tradition at CHI in the future.

CSCW 2010 - Part 2 ThoughtSwap-ing

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:42:52 -0800

This year I had a full paper accepted into CSCW, titled “Lessons from ThoughSwap-ing: Increasing Participants Coordinative Agency in Collocated Discussion”. In the paper we discuss the design evolution of ThoughtSwap, which is a piece of software I dreamed up and implemented with fellow graduate students at Virginia Tech. ThoughtSwap was first implemented and evaluated 2.5 years ago, and its nice to be able to see it evolve into a research project that is worthy of publication and consideration by a larger community.
The aim of ThoughtSwap is to facilitate meaningful collocated discussions by (1) reducing barriers to participation, (2) requiring minimal participation from everyone, and (3) giving participants the obligation of re-presenting another participant’s thought. ThoughtSwap does this by allowing participants to enter their thoughts into the system anonymously, the thoughts are then tossed into the “hat” (which is our metaphor for the “swapping” part of ThoughtSwap), and each participant pulls another thought from the hat. Now at this point in the activity, I am depending on someone else to present my thought for me, and someone else in the room is depending on me to discuss their thought for them.
The tool is pretty simple in design and mechanism, but man, that one little feature of swapping thoughts is a powerful one. When users first pull out a thought from the hat, they first have to interpret it and then figure out a way to bring it up for discussion. They also get to hear their own thought articulated by someone else. From our evaluations, I can tell you this is hard. We’ve used it with middle school science classrooms, college level writing classes, and informal graduate student reading groups. It doesn’t matter who you are, trying to really, truly represent someone else’s thought is difficult, but it almost always brings out a new, more interesting, issue to discuss. I could go on and on with examples...but I wont do that here. (You can email me if you want to swap some thoughts, though!)
Feedback from the ThoughtSwap-ing Talk:
I practiced practiced and practiced my talk. I was still a bit nervous when I gave it, but it went really well and got some interesting questions.
Question 1 : “Right now ThoughtSwap users anonymously enter their thoughts, which may reduce barriers to participating in the discussion. But what if it is important for members of marginalized groups, (like women or minorities in a CS class, for example), to have their identity associated with their own thoughts?
This was a fantastic question. I had been spending some time thinking about how important thoughts are, how important identities are, and how important it is for us to have them tied together. It may be incredibly beneficial for a great thought to be recognized and associated back to a person who may otherwise feel like an outsider and that their ideas aren’t usually heard in the same ways as other participants’. At the same time, because there is this feeling of being different and not being heard in the same way, there is some apprehension in expressing yourself as you truly want to.
What is interesting about the ThoughtSwap evaluations though, is that the system is not stopping you from jumping up and declaring “that thought you just said was mine”, but it absolutely never happens in our evaluations. Also, there have been moments when participants have asked, “who’s thought is this?” and no one has ever fessed up and claimed it! Furthermore, you can sometimes get your own thought back from the system (the “swapping” is purely random), and participants will sometimes go on and discuss it as if the thought they entered and received back is not theirs at all! Its like once that thought is tossed into the hat, the identity has been stripped. That is the perception at least. Whether that is a good thing all the time or not, I really don’t know. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about it and reading literature. I’ll let everyone know once I’ve run some more experiments and have a better answer.
Question 2: “Right now you’ve done a lot of evaluation of ThoughtSwap in classroom settings, but how do you see ThoughtSwap working in other contexts like the work-place?”
I think ThoughtSwap could be useful anywhere deep meaningful discussions are wanted and warranted! Of course that was my answer ;-) We hope, in the future, to use ThoughtSwap with different groups of people. Such as, work place discussions, negotiations, or on “hot topics” that could be controversial. Its hard to get into a deep, sticky, but important debate sometimes. ThoughtSwap has been designed to scaffold that type of activity.
I had a great time talking about ThoughtSwap at CSCW this year. Thank you to everyone who attended my talk, I really appreciate it!

CSCW 2010 - Part 1

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:30:13 -0800

Last week I had the pleasure of traveling down to Savannah, GA to attend the CSCW 2010 conference. Steve Harrison, one of my committee members, and fellow lab mates Tejinder Judge and Sirong Lin, accompanied me. Steve drove us all down there and back in the family mini van. Overall, it was a great trip and I had been meaning to blog about my experiences for awhile now - here is the first installment.
Opening Plenary Keynote by Clay Shirky
I am kicking myself right now for not taking notes on Clay Shirky’s opening plenary speech, because I thought it was fantastic. The general thrust of the speech, which he also talks about in his latest book “Here Comes Everybody”, was that with the tools provided to people through the internet, groups of people with a common interest are able to self-organize and get work done. He pointed out that there are two types of work, big ‘W’ Work, which is what you do because your boss tells your to, and little ‘w’ work, which is the work we do for pretty much everything else, like interact socially with other people. It takes work to interact and communicate with other people, and when we design software for collaboration we should take the existing processes for getting work and Work done.
Also, these self-organizing groups of people are creating organizational structures that don’t resemble the ones in more traditional corporate groups, like big companies and non-profits. He illustrated this through several examples, my favorite of them being the Grobanites for Charity who are all fans of Josh Groban and wanted to raise money for charities as well. The Grobanites didn’t want to just give all their money to the Josh Groban Foundation (also a non-profit chairty), they wanted to be in charge of where their money went, while still professing a love of Josh Groban and everything he does. All money donated to the Grobanites goes straight to charity because they have zero operating costs - all the Work (and work) gets done by volunteers.
Furthermore, these groups of people, who share a common interest and have found each other on the internet, are forming communities with their own cultures, values, and governing structures. There are “rules” to participate in their groups just like there are rules to participating in any society we find ourselves in. Again, sometimes their community held beliefs on right and wrong don’t really resemble how the law or larger society would define right and wrong. Regardless, when we design and insert new technologies and structures into these organizations, their existing culture can be supported or “broken”. That is, enforcing a new rule or a new medium of interaction can change their community culture and values permanently.
In my limited experience of conference attending, this opening keynote was one of the best I’ve seen. His book is currently on my Amazon wishlist, waiting for me when I save up my silly grad-student money to purchase it!

Something Cool- MicroMiser

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:35:53 -0800

My husband has been working for MiserWare since last May, and I finally downloaded and tried out their beta program!
MiserWare is a local company, situated in Blacksburg, VA near Virginia Tech, which was started by one of the CS professors at VT and his graduate students. Their products, MicroMiser and ServerMiser, can reduce the amount of energy your system uses up to 35% without sacrificing performance. Other methods of power management that come native to Windows or can be installed on Linux either don’t save as much energy or have noticeable impacts on your machine performance. MicroMiser has been designed for individual machines, and ServerMiser has been designed for data centers.
Right now, if you are running Linux or Windows, you can try MicroMiser for free! They just launched their Windows beta a couple days ago and the Linux version about six months ago. I started using MicroMiser on the PC I have in the graduate lab, and the screen shot above is MicroMiser telling me how much energy I am saving.
They are really trying to recruit as many people as possible to use their beta version of MicroMiser. They are even giving away iPod Nanos to the first 50 people to earn 225 “recruiting points”, and will give away Eee PCs to the top recruiters at the end of the recruiting period. I have already secured myself one of the iPod Nanos, (YAY! I never win anything!!!) and I’m working on the Eee PC!
If you would like to try MicroMiser, help the guys at MiserWare test their product, and help me earn an Eee PC, you should go to this link:
https://secure.miserware.com/account/signup/?ref=slegogudrasubresestipretaphesp

You’ll have to sign the license agreement, and then you can download the appropriate version of the software and follow the (easy) installation instructions. My install only took about 30 seconds to complete. If for any reason you have problems installing it, or just have questions, you can email them at support@miserware.com .
Really, this might be the easiest way ever to reduce your carbon footprint. So try it!

Giving away our Christmas tree

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:02:42 -0800

Above you will see a picture of the first Christmas tree Wes and I ever put up as a married couple. Its an artificial tree, a hand-me-down from Wes’s mother. We didn’t have very many ornaments, but it was quite lovely to me. Unfortunately, we put it up the first year we were married, but after that we never put it up again.
Our first year of marriage was spent in an apartment with a large living room, but then we bought our own town-house that has much less space. Also, we are always with our families on Christmas day, and we have a cat that likes to tear paths destruction while we are away. The tree is just not very practical for us, and for the past three Christmases its been stored away and never used.
This year I decided to let someone else get good use out of it since we wouldn’t be. I posted it on Freecycle, and within 20 minutes I had a taker. Freecycle is a non-profit organization that sets up websites for communities to post and request discarded items. The idea is reduce the amount of stuff that goes to landfills by giving it to someone who can use it. I’ve posted quite a few bits and bobs on Freecycle, but this is the biggest item by far.
The family who will be using my Christmas tree this year is a family of six, mom, dad, and 4 kiddos, who have been hit by the recession. The dad lost his job and had to start a new one, while the mom has been out of work since she had to quit due to a high-risk pregnancy. As they said in their email, they weren’t planning on getting a tree this year since it would take away from the number of gifts they could afford to give their children. Now they’ll have a free tree and some lights to go along with it. If you had some old Christmas decorations you were thinking of getting rid of, then I really encourage you to put it on Freecycle. You never know what value someone else may get from what you no longer need.