Jason Hong's Confabulations

The United States still has a large lead over China, but if the current sad state of affairs with respect to education and research continues here in the US, it's only a matter of time before China catches up. When Andrew Chi-chih Yao, a Princeton professor who is recognized as one of the United States' top computer scientists, was approached by Qinghua University in Beijing last year to lead an advanced computer studies program, he did not hesitate. [JIH - Andrew Chi-chih Yao won the Turing Award in 2000] ... China has already pulled off one of the most remarkable expansions of education in modern times, increasing the number of undergraduates and people who hold doctoral degrees fivefold in 10 years. ... In only a generation, China has sharply increased the proportion of its college-age population in higher education, to roughly 20 percent now from 1.4 percent in 1978. In engineering alone, China is producing 442,000 new undergraduates a year, along with 48,000 graduates with

One of my friends just published a book on transportation, entitled The Transporation Experience. While much of the transportation systems in Europe and the United States are mature (if not senescent), the rest of the world is still planning, developing, and deploying new systems. The accomplishments and mistakes of places like the United Kingdom and the United States, then, can teach us lessons that may be applied to places where transportation remains nascent or adolescent. The Transportation Experience seeks to understand the genesis of transportation policy in America and the UK, along with the roles that this policy plays as systems are innovated, deployed, and reach maturity, and how policies might be improved. The work presents case studies of particular transport experiences in rail, road, water and air (with a special emphasis on railroads), and then finds commonalities in all of these experiences with thematic analyses that are often bold and unconventional. The book is predi

Very cool... Link

Someone created a fisheye widget for the web, basically the Mac OS X dock. Pretty amazing to see it working in a web browser! Link

One reader asks about ubicomp and its relationship to supply chain management. [We think ubicomp is] simply the philosophy of using computation to augment the ability of entities in a non-invasive way. If our definition is correct, then would it follow that technologies which can vastly improve transparency across a supply chain without requiring significant process changes be one valid application of ubiquitous computing? If so, then wouldn't any and all supporting technologies (data storage facility, barcodes, etc.) be part of ubiquitous computing technologies within that context? My response: Well, on the one hand, the term ubiquitous computing is sufficiently general that it could include lots of things, sort of like personal computing. On the other hand, if you look at the specific research that calls itself ubiquitous computing, you only see certain kinds of things. For example, mobile computing, sensor networks, large displays, etc. Lots of areas with previous work done (e

http://www.bewitched.com/research.html Some really amazing information visualizations by Martin Wattenberg. Includes QuerySketch, sketching for retrieval of relevant stock graphs Tree map layout of the stock market History Flow, modifications to wikipedia Site X-Ray, modifying a page in place to see log analysis data

Spammers are posting comments, so I turned on the word verification.

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/streaming/archives.html A bunch of HCI talks at Georgia Tech's GVU (Graphics Visualization Usability) lab.