According to McCain, there are “21 billion barrels of proven oil reserves” offshore.

The next question is: how long will 21 billion barrels last? According to the Energy Information Administration, the United States consumes over 20 million barrels per day.

Okay, now that we’ve collected the numbers, let’s do a little math.

If we were to use only the oil from the offshore oil reserves, then that oil would be entirely used up in less than three years. (We run out of offshore oil 30 March 2011, according to these figures.)

My best support experience has definitely been with Vircom.

A number of years ago, I worked at a small local ISP. I was the network admin and also handled most of the tech support calls. We used Vircom’s Windows-based email server.

Someone at MCI Worldcom had upgraded the software on their routers and ended up knocking their entire backbone offline. So none of my customers could get on the Internet. I had been on the phone all morning explaining the situation to our understandably upset customers. One of the phone calls I received was from Yves of Vircom. I was subscribed to many of the Vircom discussion lists and he noticed that the messages being sent to me were bouncing.

I immediately apologized for the bounced messages and explained the situation. He understood and informed me that he hadn’t called because the bounced messages were causing him problems, but because he wanted to make sure that our mail server wasn’t the problem.

That’s right: he saw the bounced messages and thought that our email server may be having problems so he called me to offer tech support.

Currently the Tufte-LaTEX project only has a handout document class. When I get a few minutes (read: “when I get bored working on the stuff I should be working on”) I’ll finish up the book style I’ve been working on.

If you discover any bugs with the current document styles or have any suggestions for improvement (or just want to rain praise upon us), join the mailing list.

I found a driver for the webcam here: https://groups.google.com/group/microdia.

Instructions on downloading and building the driver follow. For more thorough instructions, I’d recommend looking at Testing the Microdia driver.

Since we’ll be compiling a kernel driver, you’ll need to install the kernel source files:

$ sudo apt-get install kernel-package linux-source build-essential exuberant-ctags

Next you’ll need to install git so we can download the driver’s source code:

$ sudo apt-get install git-core gitk git-gui git-doc curl

Now we’ll download the webcam driver:

$ git clone http://repo.or.cz/r/microdia.git

Let’s compile the kernel module (webcam driver):

$ cd microdia
$ make

Load the videodev kernel module so that /dev/video0 can be created:

$ sudo modprobe videodev

Now let’s load our new kernel driver:

$ sudo insmod ./microdia.ko

Check to see that the driver loaded successfully:

$ dmesg

You should see something like this at the bottom of the output:

[107348.616179] microdia: Microdia USB2.0 webcam driver startup
[107348.616563] microdia: Microdia USB2.0 Webcam - Product ID 624F.
[107348.616570] microdia: Release: 0100
[107348.616574] microdia: Number of interfaces : 1
[107348.623570] microdia: Microdia USB2.0 Camera is now controlling video device /dev/video0
[107348.623950] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb_microdia_driver

Now we can test the driver with VLC:

$ sudo apt-get install vlc
$ vlc v4l:// :v4l-vdev="/dev/video0" :v4l-adev="/dev/dsp" :v4l-norm=3 :v4l-frequency=-1

Make sure that /dev/video0 matches the device listed in the dmesg output above). You should see a window displaying the webcam video and the microphone should be active.

If all goes well, you may wish to install the kernel module/driver so that it will be loaded automatically each time you boot your computer.

Copy the driver to the kernel tree:

$ sudo cp microdia.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/media/video/usbvideo/

Now add the videodev and microdia drivers to your /etc/modules file so that they get loaded automatically every time you boot your computer:

$ sudo sh -c "echo videodev >> /etc/modules"
$ sudo sh -c "echo microdia >> /etc/modules"

The biggest hurdle that I see is that you’d have to recompile the driver each time the kernel is upgraded. System76 is working on packaging it up as a System76 driver that can be updated as new kernels are released, and so that users don’t have to compile kernel drivers themselves (’cause let’s face it, no one should have to learn to do that!).

Please note that I didn’t write the driver; I just discovered it this evening and got it running.

If you run into any problems, see the Microdia kernel driver site for more details from the driver developers themselves. There is also a thread on the Ubuntu Forums covering this topic.

TagNinja is the result of a class project that Jesse and I worked on. To play TagNinja, just match the proper definition with the highlighted word. By playing, you’ll be teaching computers how to figure out which definition it should use for a word in a particular sentence. Then we’ll be able to bark out orders to our computers just like in Star Trek!

Corpora Storm and Shadow Parser

During HCI 522: “Scientific Methods of Human–Computer Interaction”, we wrote a blog entry each week along with a class presentation. I’ve mirrored my blog entries here in the past.

Now we’ve collected our favorite blog entries from that class and compiled them into a book: Shiny Happy Users. We published the book through lulu.com. There’s a hardcover edition and a paperback edition. And if you’re not convinced to buy a copy of the book, you can even download the PDF for free.

In addition to the book, we’ve created a companion DVD that contains our video presentations and slides.

And if all this weren’t enough, the books and DVD are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. That means that you can give copies of our work to your friends and you can make derivatives of our work. Some examples of derivatives would be: translate it into a different language, rework the essays into lecture notes for a class, and transform the work into a different format (say, for e-book readers).

Visit the Shiny Happy Users website for more information and samples of the essays and presentations.

I did all the typesetting for the book, so I’m sure there are plenty of errors and typos. if you find any, please let me know!

Update: I’ve uploaded a video of my talk.

1. Make answers mutually exclusive.

   How many days per week do you wear socks?  0–1  1–2  2–3  3–4  4–5	How many days per week do you wear socks?  0–1  2–3  4–5  6–7
   BAD	GOOD

   If I wear socks three days a week, I don’t know which option I should select in the first example. In the second example, the choice is obvious.

2. Don’t make them reach for their calculators.

   How many hours a year do you use the Internet?	How many hours a day do you use the Internet? How many hours a week do you use the Internet?
   BAD	GOOD

   In the first example, I would have to estimate how many hours a day I spend on the Internet and then multiply that a few times to get the hours per year. That’s a lot of work! Instead, you should estimate what the proper time period should be when writing the question. If you anticipate that people use the Internet a few hours each day, then ask for the answer in hours per day. If you suspect that they only use the Internet a few minutes each day or a few hours each week, change the wording accordingly.

3. Provide a neutral option on the Likert scale.

   Cold pizza is good for breakfast.  Strongly disagree  Disagree  Agree  Strongly agree	Cold pizza is good for breakfast.  Strongly disagree  Disagree  Neither agree or disagree  Agree  Strongly agree
   BAD	GOOD

4. Make it clean when the respondent can provide multiple answers.

   Which flavor of ice cream do you like?  Vanilla  chocolate  Strawberry Which pizza toppings do you like?  Pepperoni  Cheese  Sausage  Anchovies	Which flavor of ice cream do you like? (Choose one.)  Vanilla  chocolate  Strawberry Which pizza toppings do you like? (Choose all that apply.)  Pepperoni  Cheese  Sausage  Anchovies
   BAD	GOOD

   It should be obvious to the respondent when they can select more than one answer. In the second example, I’ve added the notes “(Choose one.)” and “(Choose all that apply.)”. I’ve added another small visual clue by changing the selection circles to boxes to indicate that more than one choose is allowed.

5. Don’t provide so many options that it’s difficult to choose.

   What is your favorite color?
   Amaranth  Amber  Amethyst  Apricot  Aqua  Azure  Beige  Black	Blue  Brown  Cerulean  Cinnamon  Copper  Coral  Cream  Crimson	Cyan  Emerald  Eggplant  Forest green  Fuchsia  Gold  Goldenrod  Grey	Green  Indigo  Ivory  Jade  Lavender  Lemon  Lilac  Lime

   This one is pretty self-explanatory. If you overwhelm the respondent with choices they’ll likely give up and pick the first one that seems reasonable.

6. Don’t exclude possible responses.

   How many hours a week do you spend watching television?  1–5  6–10  11–15  16–20	How many hours a week do you spend watching television?  none  1–5  6–10  11–15  16–20  more than 20
   BAD	GOOD

   You should consider the edge cases. For instance, the respondent may never participate in an activity or perform some task. Also, you shouldn’t put an artificial upper limit on the responses.

7. Placing the demographic questions at the end of the survey may result in more complete responses since the respondent has already invested time in the survey.
8. Instead of asking “How old are you?”, ask “In what year were you born?“ You’ll often get more responses this way.
9. If you’re asking an open-ended question and provide lines on which to write the answer, double-space the lines so the respondent has plenty of room to write. (I hate it when I have to squeeze my handwriting into a 1/8-inch high space.)
10. Clearly indicate which questions are required and which are optional.
11. When requiring personal information, explain what you will use it for.

Do you have any pet peeves or tips regarding survey questions? If so, I’d love to hear them; leave a comment below!

References and Resources

• Kevin’s presentation slides (PDF)
• Kevin’s presentation video (Quicktime movie)

Here are some juicy quotes from the article:

All of us usability theorists have long argued for iterative design, trying to get rid of the lengthy, inflexible linear project schedules that stymie flexibility and change, that slows up projects. Instead, we have championed iterative design, with frequent, rapid prototyping and frequent, rapid test.

But wait a minute, our continual plea for up-front user studies, field observations, and the discovery of true user needs are a step backwards: they are a linear, inflexible process inserted prior to the design and coding stages. We are advocating a waterfall method for us, even as we deny it for others. Yes, folks. By saying we need time to do field studies, observations, rapid paper prototypes and the like, we are contradicting the very methods that we claim to be promoting.

I recommend reading the article in full. I would also love to see some discussion on the topic here. Why do you agree or disagree with Donald Norman?

References and Resources

• Kevin’s presentation slides (PDF)
• Kevin’s presentation video (Quicktime movie)
• “Why doing user observations first is wrong” by Donald Norman.

In an article I found recently by Dan Saffer, he provides a counterpoint to this widely held belief.

Saffer claims that there are only eight conditions that require user research. If you or your project doesn’t fall into one of these categories, you shouldn’t need user research and can rely solely on the designer’s experience.

1. You don’t know the subject area well.
2. The project is based in a culture different to your own.
You don’t know who the users are.
3. The product is one you’d never use yourself.
4. The product contains features and functionality that are for specific types of users, who are doing specific types of work, work you don’t necessarily do yourself.
5. You need inspiration.
6. You need empathy.
7. You don’t have much expertise.

Some questions that this raised for me are: Are there any projects that fail to fall into at least one of these conditions?

What do you think?

References and Resources

• Kevin’s presentation slides (PDF)
• Kevin’s presentation video (QuickTime) — seek to half way through video
• “Research Is a Method, Not a Methodology” at Adaptive Path by Dan Saffer.

Paper prototyping is a variation of usability testing where representative users perform realistic tasks by interacting with a paper version of the interface that is manipulated by a person “playing computer,” who doesn’t explain how the interface is intended to work.

Paper prototyping provides a fast and cheap way to test many user interactions. It is especially useful in conjunction with an iterative software design process. There are, however, some problems that paper prototyping won’t help you uncover: time delays, scrolling, colors, images, and fonts.

References and Resources

• Kevin’s presentation slides (PDF)
• Kevin’s presentation video (Quicktime movie)
• Paper Prototyping companion site by Carolyn Snyder
• “Paper Prototyping” at A List Apart by Shawn Medero shows some great examples of paper prototyping.

I recently ordered a used, hardcover edition of Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War by Tony Daniel from a seller on Amazon.com’s marketplace. A few days later, I received the following email from the seller:

I just wanted to advise you that your package was mailed to you by me, a SECOND time! The original package that I mailed to you was opened for inspection by the USA Postal Service, under their Homeland Security procedures, or to see if it was, in fact “media mail” or unauthorized mailing items and the address label somehow got destroyed and was finally sent back to me for repair.

I have repackaged your item and you should get it in a very short time. The Postal Service has agreed to reimburse me for the first postage fee paid so all is not lost.

I’m very sorry that this has held up you delivery and I hope you receive it soon. Could you please let me know when your item arrives so I can cross it off my long list of things to worry about?

I’m not sure how it’s possible to confuse a cardboard-wrapped hardcover book with a bomb or anything else the Department of Homeland Security would be concerned with, but my book did eventually arrive.

Last night we had 5 inches of snow dumped on us along with some ice. My yard is now a graveyard for tree branches. My neighbor’s tree had a branch fall into my driveway. One of my trees threw branches at my bedroom and at my other neighbor’s car. Another tree in my backyard has a branch resting across the power and cable lines going to my house. You can find more photos at http://godby.org/ice.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I was a technology coordinator for a small, rural K-12 school. I was tasked to organize six high school seniors to create a new school website.

Since the school’s website was to also serve as a community resource, our audience was very broad and ill-defined. We decided to use personas to help us design the website. The following is the process we used to design the website

Step 1: List the types of users

We first created a list of all of the types of users that we thought would visit our site. Our list included user types such as:

• elementary students,
• high school students,
• teachers,
• parents,
• grandparents, and
• school officials.

Step 2: Create a persona to represent each class of users

Next, the students and I wrote one persona for each class of users. A couple examples of our personas follow:

Sally is a 17-year-old senior who likes to hang out with her friends and chat online. She loves taking pictures for the yearbook and never misses a ball game.

Jim is Sally’s dad. He doesn’t trust Sally to drive his new truck to all those ball games she insists on going to, so he drops her off and picks her up at the school for each game. Being a single parent, Jim is also in charge of cooking the meals at home.

The personas that we actually wrote were two or three paragraphs long.

Hidden step

A “hidden step” that I failed to include in the slides is that after writing the personas, we discussed them and fleshed them out a bit. We explored the various goals and values that each of the characters possessed. This lead us into the next step.

Step 3: What features does each character want?

After exploring the goals and values of each character, we were able to tease out the specific website features that would benefit each of them.

Sally goes to the website to find out when that book report is due. She also wants to see the pictures from last night’s game. Oh, and if they’re serving mystery meat tomorrow for lunch, she’s bringing her own.

Jim has to schedule his time off work around Sally’s ball games and visits the website to check the schedule for the upcoming week. Sally harps at him if he fixes the same thing for dinner as she had for lunch, so he checks the day’s lunch menu as well.

Step 4: Tally up the features

Next, we tallied up the number of personas that wanted each feature. This helped us determine which features were most important and which features would be least utilized.

Step 5: Design the website

We used a few guidelines in designing the website, for example:

• Place the most common features on the front page of the site where they are easily found.
• Consider accessibility:
  • The typeface should be large enough (or resizable) so that the grandparents can read the site
  • Since broadband wasn’t available in this area, the site needs to be a small download. Don’t use large images or Flash or require other multimedia extensions/plugins.

The Result

Since most of our personas were interested in the lunch menu, upcoming events, and recent events, we placed those items on the main page of the site. Most of the other features can be found be following the links in the navigation sidebar.

Overall, most people liked the site. There were some features that we didn’t predict, however. One example was that people wanted to check the website to see if school was delayed or canceled do to inclement weather. So on the days that school was delayed or canceled, we added a new red alert box above the upcoming events and lunch menu blocks that alerted the visitor.

References and Resources

• Kevin’s presentation slides (PDF)
• Kevin’s presentation video (Quicktime movie)
• OK/Cancel Jack and Jill comic

http://kevin.godby.org/lt2bib/

Let me know if it works for you or if you run into any problems with it.

Unfortunately, the process is a little tedious. I generally start by searching Google or Google Scholar. Once I find an interesting paper, I’ll click on the link. Oftentimes, this will direct me to a login page for whatever archiving service is holding the article hostage. At this point, I have to look at the journal title and volume number. Then I need to go to the library’s huge list of electronic journals and find the suspect journal in the list. Then I have to log in. Then I have to dig around the archives to find the volume and issue that the article appeared in. Finally, I have to scroll through the list of articles in that issue and then find the “download PDF” link. This process isn’t so bad when you just do it once. But when I found myself going through this process repeatedly, I knew I had to find a better way.

So I wrote a little ISU Journals bookmarklet that may help. To install the bookmarklet, just drag the bookmarklet link to your bookmark toolbar in Firefox.

ISU Journals bookmarklet

To use it, just find an article that appears interesting. Click on the link for that article. This will usually lead you to a login page. Then just click on the “ISU Journals” bookmarklet and it will redirect you to the ISU Library login page. Log in using your ISU student identification number (plus the last two digits that no one else ever uses) and whatever random PIN you set. If the library has access to that electronic journal, you should be able to download the full text of the article now.

Please let me know if this works for you or if you run into snags. It’s my first attempt at a very simple bookmarklet, so I may have failed miserably.

The Guidelines

The guidelines in the book fall under four basic tenets:

• On being a butler
• Don’t impose: respect physical effort
• Don’t impose: respect mental effort
• Be helpful

On being a butler

Software should act like a butler. It should always be available. When asked to do something, it should be prepared to do it with few questions and no complaints. If there is a problem, it should find a way to fix it or work around it without bothering the user. (Also, it should have an English accent.)

Software shouldn’t disturb the user by interrupting and suggesting ways it can be helpful. Instead, it should pay attention to what the user has done in the past and so that it can better anticipate what the user will want in the future. However, software shouldn’t go overboard in anticipating the user’s needs because it is more costly to do something the user doesn’t want than to not take the initiative. Software should be courteous and respectful—even when the user asks the software to do something it can not do.

Don’t impose: Respect physical effort

Treat clicks as sacred. Clicks include mouse clicks, keyboard presses, taps on a touchscreen, button presses on a physical device, and voice commands. Require as few clicks as possible.

Remember where users put things.
Remember everything users do to adjust the application. The next time they come back, everything should be just as they left it.

Remember what they told you. This one’s easy: don’t ask people for the same information more than once. If they update their information, remember the updated information.

Don’t impose: Respect physical effort

Make common tasks visible and hide infrequent tasks. Determine the most common user tasks and make sure they are visible and easily accessible. Hide less common tasks so they don’t clutter the screen and make it more difficult to find the common tasks.

Give feedback and show signs of progress. Acknowledge the user’s request and, if you can’t comply immediately, let them know what you’re up to and how long it will take. If a command can’t be carried out quickly, let users interrupt.

Keep preferences to a minimum—provide smart defaults. Most users never modify the default preferences, so the application’s default behavior is effectively the only behavior.

Be helpful

Offer sufficient information early, in context. Prevent errors. Indicate which information is required, what format is expected, etc. Try to prevent errors whenever possible.

Solve problems—don’t complain or pass the buck. Don’t bother the user with problems you can solve yourself. If you can tell the user how to fix the problem, try fixing it yourself.

Be predictable. Develop a set of conventions to use throughout your application. Users should be able to predict what a feature does based on their knowledge of what the other features do.

Request and offer only relevant information. Don’t mislead. Don’t offer options that are not available. Ask for information only if and when you will use it (and then remember it). Never collect and then ignore sensitive information.

Explain in plain language. Avoid jargon. Don’t blame the user. Indicate the consequences of options.

Discussion and Afterthoughts

Derrick Parkhurst pointed out that many of these guidelines keep popping up in many different books on usability. The guidelines I presented are just a sample of those in the book.

References and Resources

• Kevin’s presentation slides (PDF)
• Kevin’s presentation video (Quicktime movie)
• Designing from Both Sides of the Screen by Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski. ISBN 0-672-32151-3.

The Purpose of Usability Studies

There are a number of reasons why you might want to run usability tests. some people (QuickTime video) run usability tests to certify that a product is (or in this case, isn’t) usable by a test audience. Others may run usability tests to learn when their product is “good enough” to release. But I think the best reason for running usability tests is to learn how to improve your product.

In the first two cases, you will probably want to obtain more quantitative than qualitative results. Would you consider your product usable if more than 50% of the users can perform some task within a certain period of time? What metrics do you choose to determine when to stop “fixing” your product and release it?

But in the third case, the qualitative results will be more abundant than the quantitative results. How can you make the user’s experience more enjoyable? How can you help them feel more productive? While there are quantitative underpinnings in the methods and techniques you can employ to improve the user’s experience, much of the measurement of the experience will be qualitative. This is not a Bad Thing.

Software Development Process

Parkhurst recently presented a slide showing his idea of the development process of an e-commerce website (see below).

I think there are some problems with this process. I propose that there should be Designers between Clients and Developers.

The designers would work with the clients to determine their needs and the needs of the end-users of the product. The designers would also be responsible for determine who the target audience is and would design the product features for that audience.

Specific Counter-arguments

Step 1: Who are your users?

Parkhurst argues that it’s difficult to determine who the users of a product are and that testing the wrong users would prevent you from generalizing the test results to the general audience of the product. I agree with this so far. I disagree, however, in his thinking that this should slow down or prevent usability testing. As I outlined in the software development process above, the audience should have been prior to the developers writing the software—during the design process. By the time you have software written for users to test, you should already know who the target audience is.

Step 2: What if your product functions don’t map onto user needs?

If you’ve got a good handle on your target audience and you’ve designed with them in mind, then this shouldn’t be too big of an issue. Of course, there will be some problems—after all, that’s why we’re doing the testing!

If the product functions don’t map onto the user needs, then we’ve either designed the software incorrectly or programmed it contrary to design specs.

Step 3: There is an inherent conflict between “friends and family” and reality.

This is sometimes (but not always) true. If your friends and family are within your target audience, then they are viable test participants. They may not verbally criticize your software as much as disinterested parties, but you shouldn’t be relying solely (or even primarily) on verbalization. Most users aren’t accustomed to thinking out loud as they use software, so any information you gain from this will be qualitative anyway. The only quantitative information you’ll obtain from the test will be based on the user’s actions.

Step 4: The laboratory setting threatens ecological validity.

True enough. But ecological validity isn’t necessary to the overall validity of the experiment. If it were, then we’d have to throw out most of the quantitative research that we’re basing our design decisions on.

An example: Parkhurst does a lot of work with gaze tracking and gaze detection. Most people don’t sit at home with a gaze tracking strapped to their head. Are the results that Parkhurst obtains from these experiments invalid?

Conclusion

Many of the problems mentioned above should be addressed in the design phase of the project and the solutions should be established well before the user testing phase begins.

Jakob Nielsen wrote an article titled “Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users” which
argues that, contrary to popular belief, usability testing need not be expensive and complicated. In an earlier paper, Nielsen and Landauer (1993) showed that testing with just five users will uncover about 85% of the usability problems in a website or software application.

Discussion and Afterthoughts

On the ugliness of Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com website: Nielsen outlines his thoughts and reasoning for his “ugly” site design here: Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics. A few web designers collaborated to redesign his site incorporating graphics.

Take-home Points

Usability testing doesn’t need to be some huge, complicated process—just grab a few people and get started!

References and Resources

• Kevin’s presentation slides
• Kevin’s presentation video (Quicktime movie)
• Nielsen, Jakob. “Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users,” Alertbox.
• Nielsen, Jakob and Landauer, Thomas K. “A mathematical model of the finding of usability problems,” Proceedings of ACM INTERCHI’93 Conference (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 24–29 April 1993), pp. 206–213.

Looking at all metropolitan areas with populations of 50,000 or greater, Ithaca, N.Y. ranks No. 1. Home to Cornell University, a whopping 7.92 percent of residents hold Ph.D.s. Ames, Iowa, where Iowa State University is located, is second, at 7.2 percent. Other university towns round out the top five: In State College, Pa., the figure is 6.04 percent; for Corvallis, Ore., it’s 5.63 percent; and in College Station, Texas, it’s 5.14 percent.

<wistful thinking>
Someday I may join their ranks—after I write my master’s thesis, finish my Ph.D. coursework, and write a dissertation.
</wistful thinking>

For those interested in the talks, but don’t have 20 hours to watch them, I recommend sessions 4 and 10 for the most lively discussions.

While reading Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, I came across a section in chapter 6 titled “The Longevity of Information.” In this section, Kurzweil discusses how it’s difficult to keep digital information accessible in lieu of changing media formats, file formats going extinct, and degradation of magnetic and optical media. In footnote 42, he writes:

Stweart Brand, “Written on the Wind,” Civilization Magazine, November 1998 (“01998” in Long Now terminology), available online at http://www.longnow.org/10klibrary/library.htm.

The link is dead and now leads to a 404 page.

Unfortunately, the irony doesn’t end there. I started at their home page to try to find a copy of the article. I clicked on Projects thinking that the “10klibrary” mentioned in the URL may be listed there. Instead, I found a description of the “Long Server” project. It sounded similar to what I was looking for, so I clicked on the Long Server heading and found myself on yet another 404 page.

In any case, I’ve found an article by Tim Berners-Lee (FOAF) that may be useful: Cool URIs don’t change.

Here’s the introduction that Jesse wrote about Project Icarus:

Since the beginning of time humans have watched birds soar through the air and have dreamed of doing the same. However, the laws of physics have conspired to make that dream difficult, if not impossible, for a single human under his or her own power. Fortunately, we are not constrained by physical law in virtual worlds so we can come close to fulfilling this dream for many. Our primary objective for this project is to allow a person to navigate a virtual world as if they are flying by flapping their arms like wings. A secondary objective for this project is to minimize the equipment the user must interacts with in order to experience self-powered flight. Ideally the user will enter a virtual reality CAVE, start the program and fly.

We demonstrated the program to our classmates and won first place in the class competition. The prize was $50 which almost covered the cost of the hardware we had purchased for the project (excluding the camera equipment that I purchased). I posted an excerpt of the video of the poster competition on the Icarus website along with some other videos. Ethan gave a good interview while I stood idly by in the background.

The remaining final project is for my linguistics class. I’m working on a natural language search program that interfaces with the IMDB database. So far it only understands sentences such as “Who starred in Harry Potter?” I’ll be adding more grammar and sentences to it this weekend since I have to demonstrate it for the instructor on Monday.

And if finishing that project wasn’t enough, I need to write a bunch of code to improve the wheat combine simulator because some John Deere people are coming by on Tuesday to see what we’ve got so far. That’s right—Tuesday of finals week! Can they have worse timing?

To bed now… I’m going to have a work-filled day tomorrow—er, later this morning.

April 5, 2006 is CSS Naked Day! CSS Naked Day is the day when many sites disable the stylesheets that provide the nice looking presentation of their websites so that you can see the underlying structure in pure, unadultered HTML. It also highlights some of the semantic bugs that a site may normally hide under the façade of the stylesheets.

So for today only, here’s my site without the normal stylesheets. Enjoy!

I think that students should be allowed to bring their laptops to class with them, for a myriad of reasons:

• In large lecture halls, it’s difficult to find a seat that allows me to see the whiteboard or slideshow. It’d be great if the slideshow were simulcast to my laptop.
• With a laptop, I’m able to answer my own questions without pestering the teacher, thereby freeing up her time to help other students.
• I can supplement the lecture with material from the Internet.
• I can type my notes much more quickly than writing them longhand.

To counter some of the counter-arguments:

• If my use of a laptop is distracting you, then either (a) the lecture isn’t interesting enough or worthy of keeping your attention (which is partially the fault of the instructor), or (b) focusing your attention is your problem, not mine.
• If I do show up to class and play solitaire on my laptop, then at least I showed up to class. Why did I come to class? Because I might miss something important, and I felt that there was some value in being there. As a professor, you should take some minor comfort in that. It could have been worse: I may have determined that it wasn’t worth showing up at all.

[It's 9 am and Kevin is sound asleep. His cell phone rings. Groggily, he presses the phone to his ear and mumbles...]

Kevin: Hello?

Caller: Uh.. is this the meeting?

Kevin [not comprehending]: Wha—? Meeting?

Caller: Uh, yeah. The conference?

Kevin: Uh, no. It’s not. You must have the wrong number.

Caller: Oh, okay. Sorry. Bye. [Caller hangs up.]

[A few seconds later, Kevin's phone rings again. Kevin notices that it's the same caller ID number and shunts it to his voice mail.]

This sort of thing has been happening for the past six months. Tonight, at 7 pm I received thirteen calls—most of them from Winnipeg. I managed to eek some information out of a couple of the callers and determined that GoToMeeting is the culprit. The GoToMeeting number is 641-985-1010. My cell phone number is the same, with two digits transposed.

I sent GoToMeeting “feedback” on their website. Hopefully they’ll be more careful about the phone numbers they give out in the future and will correct this typo soon. Both I and their customers will appreciate it.

Jesse and I teamed up and worked on a project we called Narcissus. Narcissus was an implementation of a self-detection algorithm for robots.

The results of our experiment were promising, so we submitted a student abstract to the AAAI 2006 conference in Boston, Massachusetts, a few months ago. We just heard back from them today, and they accepted our paper.

Our paper, “Robot Self-Recognition Using Conditional Probability–Based Contingency,” is a two-page abstract and can be read online. We received two reviews with very helpful comments. After cleaning up the paper a bit, we will submit a final version in early April. Additionally, we will be at the AAAI Conference in Boston in July. So if anyone’s around Boston and wants to meet up then, let me know!

When checking prices of flights on http://www.kayak.com/, for example, I can click on the airport code link and it opens a window that lists all the airports and their codes. However, instead of a text listing, why not have a map pop-up (similar to the calendar popups that they use) which allows the user to select the blip representing their airport? The initial click could zoom the map to a region and then show dots representing the airports. When the mouse touches a dot a tooltip should appear which displays the name of the airport.

Our presentation can be downloaded from here.

Before I got around to mentioning it to the Robotics Club, I found his Hollerbot project posted to a number of blogs.

Anyway, he’s now joined the ISU Robotics Club. We’ve shown him our VADR project (which is quite similar to what he’d like to do), and I think he’s going to help us out with improving it.

I’ll write more about it tomorrow.

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¹ Armstrong, D., Crane, C., Novick, D., Wit, J., English, R., Adsit, P., Shahady, D. “A Modular, Scalable, Architecture For Unmanned Vehicles,” Proceedings of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) Unmanned Systems 2000 Conference, Orlando, Florida, July 2000.

I obviously have nothing better to put in my blog. Must work on that. Of course, that’d require getting a life so as to have something to talk about. Hmm.. Nah. Too much work.

Which File Extension Are You?

I like to hang around with friends, chatting, dancing, all that sort of thing. We don’t appreciate outsiders, and do our best to discourage others approaching us. I enjoy occasionally wandering around randomly, and often find that when I do so, I get to where I wanted to be.

What Video Game Character Are You?

I still need to work on the design of the page, of course (pretty it up). I’d also like to try to do some clustering—folding all the near-same stories into one entry. That way, you don’t read the same story three times.