And were off! Early this morning, Ellie, Leslie and I braved the weather, hopped in Meg’s car, and splashed our way to the airport en route to CSCW. Lilly just texted to let us know about the swimming pool waiting for us — ah, Savannah in February. Glad we’re not on our way to DC.
So cookies basically helped me make it through my thesis. As Margarita and I madly typed, sitting across from each other at her dinning room table, she buttressed herself against the pain with power smoothies while I sublimated it with coffee and cookies.
During a recent dissertation defense, a colleague joked that she was tempted to dedicate her dissertation “to tea.” While every laughed at the ridiculous and endearing joke, a mild horror crept over me as I realized that I, in fact, had mentioned cookies in the acknowledgements section of my thesis. (more…)
Those who have known/tolerated me for at least a year probably know this story. It’s the same one I told last year. As children my dad would make us play a game — guess what the local news thought the 10 most notable stories of the year were, and then try creating a list of our own news.
Top 10’s were popular this year, perhaps inspired by the end of a decade: Top 10 LOLCats, Romantic Comedies, One Hit Wonders of the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s and so on.
One might almost think top 10s passe, but as one friend of mine explained: “I’ve been loving it! I have been looking at all these top 10 movie lists, revisiting favorites, and catching the ones I never got around to.”
Last year was particularly important for me. Particularly with my graduation from Georgetown, and a move to UC Irvine, a lot has changed. How funny — I just realized that a decade ago (1999) was the year I graduated from high school and moved away to college. New beginnings, new opportunities, I suppose.
Well, without further delay, 2009 in 10 bite size pieces. (more…)
Looks like I am going to Savannah! I received word a couple days ago that my paper on PatientsLikeMe was accepted for the “CSCW Research in Healthcare: Past, Present, and Future” workshop at CSCW 2010. The paper, co-authored with Caitie Lustig and my advisor, Gillian Hayes, is the start of some research engaging with issues around the representation of patients via PatientsLikeMe’s health data system.
http://www.jedbrubaker.com/patientslikeme/
In the meantime, any thing I just can not miss while I am in Savannah?
Quick and crazy factoid for the night:
Upon his death, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) (of Panopticon fame) asked to be permanently embalmed and kept at the University of London, where his corpse “now fitted with a head made of wax, is regularly wheeled into college meetings, where it is duly recorded in the minutes as ‘present, but not voting’” (Hijiya, 1983, p. 356)
Talk about persistence. A-mazing.
I am currently sitting in a lecture on ubiquitous computing, and sensors is the name of the game.
I have recently been thinking again about the engineer’s role in reinforcing essentialized notions of identity. This is particularly relevant in the ubiquitous computing space where the focus on sensors explicitly aims to sense the body.
There is a complicated theoretical argument to be articulated, but honestly, I am writing final papers, and Derrida has been keeping me up at night. So, for today, I will summarize my thinking with the following comic from ThreePanelSoul, lovingly sent my way by Daniel.
Enjoy. I’ll see you next week.
“Why do we feel like we need to keep visiting the archetype over and over and over again?” asks Karim Rashid, a New York designer. The camera, for example, which since digital photography’s complete obliteration of film has absolutely no reason to remain a metal rectangle.
Flying back from Chicago last night (and admittedly procrastinating a certain final paper), I threw open on of my favorite archetypes (the laptop) and watched the documentary Objectified. I had missed the chance to see it when it was screened at the Corcoran last summer (tickets were scarce, even for Steve) but decided to make up for lost time. (more…)
Morning flight to Chicago. The anteaters will have to deal without me until Monday because I have some very important meetings to attend…
I have a strange habit. When things get really stressful, I start fantasying that I am somewhere else. This is nothing unique, but in my case, studying technologies that actually allow people to be somewhere else, it expresses itself in slightly strange ways.
When writing the literature review for my thesis, for example, and having spent so much time researching virtual communities, I decided that I should do more than read about them — I should live in one too! And so off I went to LambdaMOO, one of the most famous text-based virtual communities.
Sitting in my DC condo, I would slide my LambdaMOO existence off to one of my screens, while continuing to typing away in Word. A quick glance to the terminal with its black screen and white text was enough to remind me that somewhere else, some portion of me wasn’t enduring the pain of writing a thesis. This worked, kind of, but not for very long. (more…)
A couple links for your Friday fun. Some new, others fall under the “in case you missed it.”
From the “technology is so cool” department: 10/GUI
Dear mouse, you suck. Monitor, you too. See what happens when one goes about “rethinking the desktop to leverage [new] technology in an intuitive and powerful way.”
From the “let’s create an infrastructure no one needs” department: Project ‘Gaydar’
At MIT, an experiment identifies which students are gay, raising new questions about online privacy.
From the “Jed just really likes flash mobs” department: Madonna Celebration flash mob in Shinjuku, Tokyo
I particularly love the ballet girl at around 1:50. For CCTers out there — musicals and utopia? I think so. For Megan, who says networks are “unhuman”? 
(via Towleroad, and omg, I just found another — in case you want to know what one look like when a drag queen takes control.)
And just because I am running around at UCI Medical Center this morning: Computer detects abuse before doctors
Victims of domestic abuse can hide the truth from doctors, but they leave clues in their medical records that a computer program has now learned to follow. The program could save lives by acting as an early warning system for domestic violence, flagging up possible cases of abuse to doctors months or even years before they would otherwise be detected.
