Jason Hong's Confabulations

Apparently, an interview with Business Week reveals that CMU's very own Johnny Lee is now the leader of a cult! :) Congratulations Johnny! Over the past 12 months, a series of quirky but compelling videos uploaded to Google's (GOOG) YouTube have been delighting hackers, designers, and tech tinkerers worldwide. The videos, which feature modifications of Nintendo's (NTDOY) popular Wii console to create everything from mind-boggling 3D images to interactive whiteboards, have earned their creator a cultlike following and inspired countless other experiments. Article

"The Human-Computer Interaction Institute is well represented among the nominees for the second annual YouTube Awards. http://www.youtube.com/ytawards07 . The video of Prof. Randy Pausch’s Sept. 18 lecture, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” has been nominated for Most Inspirational. PhD student Johnny Chung Lee and his “Head Tracking for Desktop VR” video are nominated in the Instructional Video category. Winners will be chosen based on popular voting. Individuals can vote once a day in each of the 12 YouTube categories through March 19. "

Well, this was bound to happen sooner or later, but there was a recent phishing attack targeting members of the CMU community. And, no, this wasn't an experiment from our research team. SCS Computing Facilities has received the following announcement from campus Computing Services. *** To verify the authenticity of this message, see Security News & Events at *** WHO: Everyone WHAT: Phishing Emails Sent to Carnegie Mellon Accounts WHEN: Feb 21, 2008 HOW: Fraudulent emails have recently been sent to Carnegie Mellon email accounts claiming to be from the "CMU SUPPORT TEAM " asking people to reply with their "CMU Webmail account" passwords. ...

This fall, Robert Kraut and I will be teaching a course entitled The Social Web: Content, Communities, and Context (links to PDF of our course flier).