Jason Hong's Confabulations

Wombat Security Technologies has created a quiz on Facebook to test your knowledge of computer security . See if you can get the Golden Wombat!

I recently found a series of animated lectures on YouTube covering a number of topics, including motivation, economics, ethics, education, and more. By animated, I mean that there is an artist drawing what the speaker is saying, adding an incredible visual angle to the talk. So far, the talk on what really motivates us is my favorite. It looks at how monetary compensation affects creative endeavors, and other ways of incentivizing people to be more effective. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Just learned about this set of questions earlier this week at a DARPA workshop. They seem like a really useful set of questions, for product development and for research. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Heilmeier#Heilmeier.27s_Catechism

One of the writers at MIT Tech Review has blogged about our work on Locaccino. "Locaccino Shows How Facebook Places Should Work" http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25832/

Our research group is studying where people go, what it says about them, and what it says about the places they go. Our app is "CMU Mobility Monitor" on the Android Marketplace, please install if you can (no iPhone version yet). You'll also be put into a raffle to win some money.

1. Guaranteed performance levels, so that the system never locks the user out due to thrashing, virtual memory swapping, or cpu overload. For example, have the system always reserve (say) 10% of CPU exclusively for user interaction, so that the UI will always be responsive. 2. A "Wikipedia" like approach for collaborative user interface design, so that open source software developers can actually get real designers into the game. Make it so that it is possible to have a clean separation from back-end and front-end, and that anyone can go in and offer feedback and alternative designs. 3. Make it so that I can "patch" my own UI to fix bugs. For example, Intuit Quickbooks maps Ctrl-A to opening all accounts, instead of selecting all text like every other system out there. I still make this mistake despite using the software for almost two years. Alternatively, make it easy to send the patch to the developers, so that they can apply it and fix it in their next release.

I had a great meeting with an ecologist in Pittsburgh earlier this week, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that there is a company building devices for tracking birds. The devices are essentially souped up mobile phones that combine cellular phone technology, GPS, and small solar panels, and are small enough that you can strap them onto the bird. Very cool! http://celltracktech.com/