Jason Hong's Confabulations

Wow, this is really cool! Portugal Telecom has taken our Anti-phishing Phil game, but has replaced our fish with a frog. It's like I'm reliving my Frogger days! http://seguranca.sapo.pt/phishingze/

My department's former dean has a blog entry about a panel of venture capitalists, hosted by Berkeley and CMU West. My favorite point: Avoid Web 2.0 companies based upon AAA - Ajax, Adsense, and Arrogance This makes me wonder what the carrying capacity of Adsense is. How many companies / blogs out there can Adsense fully support?

Our work on Anti-Phishing Phil is mentioned in a news article by AP

"Death by PowerPoint" is a phrase the military likes to use to describe those presentations that cause your eyes to dry out and the drool to start coming out of your mouth. Being a tech-oriented HCI person, I figured we could actually develop heuristics, and possibly even a tool, to help address this problem. Here's my list of heuristics that, all of which I think could be built as a plug-in for PowerPoint: Fonts too small (try to stick to at least 24 points) Too many animations Too many sub-bullets Too much text on the slide Unreadable color combinations Too many lines in a bullet Too many fonts on the slide Ugly fonts

Alon Halevy is a former professor of computer science at University of Washington, now at Google. This latest entry from his blog on databases and HCI struck me as interesting for two reasons: It is tempting to push these problems [of how users work with structured data and their information seeking needs - JIH] to the HCI community, but I would argue this is a mistake. These problems will not be high enough on the agenda of the HCI community (there, if your device doesn’t move or perform magic, it’s uninteresting), whereas for us they are crucial for identifying good research directions and evaluating them. As a community, we need to find a way to encourage research on usability and to learn from the HCI community how to evaluate such research. We need to bring this agenda squarely into our conferences. The first interesting point is that he sees HCI primarily as being interested in wickedly cool devices. This isn't too far off the mark, unfortunately so in my opinion. The secon...

Rick Rashid, Senior VP of Microsoft Research, has a great talk summarizing research directions at MSR . The most exciting work is perhaps helping developing countries. There is also an awareness that any help should not be done as a charity, as that isn't economically sustainable.

When I got to the Pittsburgh airport today, I was shocked to see how long the line for US Air was for an early Sunday morning. It struck me that airports could offer a really nice service, which is to provide an estimate of how long the line will be at a given time, both for check-in and for security. I don't think it would be that hard to implement either. Airlines already know how many people should be checking in, and they should know the rough rate at which people can be processed. For the security line, you just need to aggregate the number of passengers across all airlines. Afterwards, calibrate your data (ie fudge the data a little) so that the numbers match reality.