Jason Hong's Confabulations

"You know, it's amazing how many supervillains have advanced degrees . Graduate schools should probably do a better job at screening those people out." -- Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory

I got in this great discussion last week about how published psych studies may not necessarily generalize, primarily because the participant pool is typically comprised of undergrad students taking Psych 101. The example used was the Fundamental Attribution Error , where people over-emphasize personality attributes and de-emphasize situational factors. In a separate discussion, Alessandro Acquisti forwarded this paper, which has one of the best titles I've seen: The Weirdest People in the World? Here, WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The argument is essentially the same, that a lot of psych research is based on a narrow slice of the world population.

I've been watching reruns of Glee recently and noticed something odd on YouTube clips of the show (what can I say, the tunes are catchy). Apparently, many of the clips have been posted in mirror image to defeat whatever system YouTube has in place to look for copyrighted materials. Very clever.

I'm not making this up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act This law is notable as the first and only ban on the trading of futures contracts of a specific commodity in United States history, and as a unique modern case with which to study the effects of the existence of an active futures market on commodity prices. I'm sure a more skilled comedian could come up with a good joke about The Onion, or build on the famous Simpson's reference .

Forbes Magazine has a nice article arguing that more disclosure isn't necessarily better , pointing out the complexity, the difficulty in making choices, and the legalese. My favorite passage: One study found that despite the [Miranda] warning the overwhelming majority of suspects (78% to 96%) waive their rights ... "Next to the warning label on cigarette packs, Miranda is the most widely ignored piece of official advice in our society."

Our group had a good year for Ubicomp with four papers accepted, all on various aspects of privacy, location, and social networking. Jialiu Lin, Guang Xiang, Jason Hong, Norman Sadeh. Modeling People’s Place Naming Preferences in Location Sharing. This paper looks at how people name places when sharing with others. Eran Toch et al. Empirical Models of Privacy in Location Sharing. This paper examines what location information people share with others, using models of how public a place is, and how mobile that individual is. Karen Tang, Jialiu Lin, Jason Hong, Norman Sadeh. Rethinking Location Sharing: Exploring the Implications of Social-Driven vs. Purpose-Driven Location Sharing. Here, we examine the difference between two different kinds of location sharing. One is purpose-driven ("where are you now?"), the other is social-driven ("hey, I'm in Paris now"). Justin Cranshaw, Eran Toch, Jason Hong, Niki Kittur, Norman Sadeh. Bridging the Gap Between Physical Locat...

The Droid phones are really amazing in terms of functionality, though the biggest surprise for me is comparing the usability of the Droid vs the HTC Hero. I've never liked virtual keyboards, so the Droid handily wins out here for me. However, the virtual desktop feels clunky on the Droid, but surprisingly useful on the Hero. In part, this is because the Hero comes with gorgeous widgets already set on the virtual desktop, providing easy access to photos, calendar, messages, and so on. These widgets are also far more useful than others I've looked for in the Android marketplace. (I poked around to see if I could transfer the HTC widgets over to the Droid, but alas! It looks like these widgets requires additional software in the background. I'm hoping HTC will sell their widgets on the Android marketplace, but I doubt it since their goal is probably to differentiate their product so as to sell more hardware). At any rate, if anyone knows of a good calendar app for Android, ple...