[Funny][Just Plain Weird] Hong Wars

Last weekend, I came to my office in Newell Simon Hall and found that a small army of action figures were poised to invade. Reminds me a little of Toy Story.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Fix a Jammed Toyota Camry Trunk

This problem needs a higher pagerank, so I figured I would post the solution here. If your Toyota Camry trunk won't open, one possible reason is that it is set to valet mode. Valet mode means that you cannot open the trunk using the release lever inside the car. To set valet mode, you put the key into the trunk lock and turn it counterclockwise. You will know that your trunk is in valet mode if the lock is horizontal rather than vertical, and if you cannot open the trunk using the lever near the driver's seat. Of course, a problem is that sometimes the Camry can get stuck in valet mode, such that you can't use your key to get out of it. (You can see how I spent part of my Sunday morning ...) The solution turns out to be WD-40 . Spray some WD-40 on your key and on the lock. Put the key in, and jiggle it around, and happiness ensues. From an interaction design perspective, it sort of makes sense to have a valet mode. After all, the point of having a valet key is to limit the...
Read more

Web 2.0 and Research

I've been chatting with many of my friends and colleagues about an issue that's been bugging me for a while, namely whether academic research has any role to play in the emerging Web 2.0 . I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that the answer is not much. I had a similar discussion with other researchers at HotMobile a few weeks ago. When the web first came out, pretty much every systems researcher ignored it because it was so ugly. The web was not very sophisticated in terms of distributed systems, HTTP lacked elegance, HTML conflated many different ideas, and so on. There were also not any really new ideas with the web, as evidenced by the fact that Tim Berners-Lee 's first paper on the Web was (probably rightfully) rejected from an ACM conference on hypertext. I'm sure one thing that really irked researchers about the nascent web was that it completely ignored the large body of work in hypertext and distributed systems that had preceded it. Even in 1997, as ...
Read more

Summary of My Past Research

Image
When doing reappointment and promotion packages for faculty, you're expected to submit a summary of your research and accomplishments. Since I'm a full professor, I'm not required to do this anymore, but I thought it would still be a useful exercise, partly to help me reflect on my work but also to share with the world what I felt were some of my key accomplishments. So here are some highlights of my research and teaching over the past twenty years. ____________________ Pioneered research on protecting people from phishing scams . This research combined ideas from machine learning, decision sciences, learning science, and game design, and greatly expanded the field of usable privacy and security in its early days. The browser warnings in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 were re-designed based on our research, and key ideas from our work are still present in all web browser warnings today. Our work detecting phishing web pages is one of the earliest and perhaps most cited pap...
Read more