I’m confirmed to go to CHI2010 in Atlanta, so I spent some time making a poster for the Ubiquitous Drums project that was miraculously accepted as a WIP. It’s nice to pretend to be a visual designer sometimes. Thanks to Mark, Jenn and Rebeca for your input.
I would really appreciate additional suggestions on how to improve the poster, or your thoughts on academic posters in general. Why are they usually so ugly?
I recently switched from shared hosting to a VPS, expecting to get an immediate and automatic performance boost. I was overly optimistic and ran into memory trouble right away. After endlessly struggling with Apache and mod_php configuration, I was ready to give up. Then on a whim, I switched to nginx/fastcgi to see the average response time drop from 1500ms to 300ms:
I signed up to do one month of paid research at CMU|Portugal before spring classes start. My task boils down to creating interesting visualizations. The bad news is that I have no experience visualizing data and the dataset I’m to visualize hasn’t yet been collected. Fortunately, I’ve always been theoretically interested in data visualization, so I was happy to have a solid excuse to explore the subject. All I needed was a sufficiently rich data set, mad skills and a bit of inspiration. read more…
As a follow up to my last post, I posted a HIT on Mechanical Turk asking 20 turkers if they know Java. I paid them 5 cents to answer the question. Surprisingly, 9 of 20 claimed to know. I was amazed at how strong selection bias was in this case, since surely not 50% of turkers know how to program!
I then asked those turkers who know Java to complete the following trivial Java method. If they wrote it correctly, I paid them a 45 cent bonus. read more…
Last semester at CMU, I was involved in a research project involving Mechanical Turk. The goal was to get Mechanical Turk users (turkers) to collaborate on creating online wikipedia-style articles. Prior to my team’s involvement, an undergraduate created a mediawiki-based platform to allow turkers to collaborate on articles. Despite a high compensation, few turkers completed the task. My team tackled the problem and came up with some interesting videos on the way. read more…
