Interrelativity

Category: Web/Tech

  • def main() in Python considered harmful

    I recently graded the first Python programming assignments in the course I'm teaching on Social and Computational Intelligence in the Computing and Software Systems program at University of Washington Bothell. Most of the students are learning Python as a second (or third) language, approaching it from the perspective of C++ and Java programming, the languages…

  • Net Smart: a call for mindful engagement with technology

    Howard Rheingold shared some highlights of what he's learned and taught about being "Net Smart" Monday night at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. Acknowledging the growing chorus of criticism of the growing prominence of online media – and it propensity for distraction, diversion and delusion – he noted that critique is necessary, but not…

  • Principle-centered Invention: Bret Victor on tools, skills, crafts and causes

    I just watched an incredibly inspiring video of Bret Victor's CUSEC 2012 talk, Inventing on Principle. Bret's principle is creators need an immediate connection to what they are creating. He illustrates this principle during the first 35 minutes of the presentation, demonstrating some fabulously empowering "live coding" tools to enable programmers to manipulate and immediately…

  • Design for Health: Notes from a Multidisciplinary CSCW 2012 Workshop

    I participated in an incredibly well organized and facilitated workshop on Brainstorming Design for Health: Helping Patients Utilize Patient-Generated Data on the Web on Saturday. The participants represented a diverse range of backgrounds and interests – even for a workshop at a Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) conference, already a particularly diverse community. Our workshop…

  • Scott Berkun’s Personal Insights on the Experience of User Experience Professionals

    Scott Berkun shared some mistakes and lessons learned from his experience as and with user experience (UX) professionals last night at a meeting of the Puget Sound Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). In a highly interactive session, he also invited the 40 or so other UX professionals who attended the meeting to share…

  • Usability and confusability in Health IT: doctor-computer interaction vs. doctor-human interaction

    A segment on the Marketplace Tech Report, Health care providers having trouble with new technology, caught my ear yesterday. The story included health and safety concerns raised by one of the authors of a 197-page report, Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care, published by the Institute of Medicine this week:…

  • Hadoop, Apache and the Benefits of Contributing to Open Source Projects

    Jake Homan, a Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn and UW Bothell CSS graduate, gave a recent guest lecture at UWB on Apache Hadoop: Petabytes and Terawatts, offering an overview and applications of Hadoop as well as related distributed computing tools developed within the Apache Software Foundation. The presentation offered a great balance of breadth and…

  • Any sufficiently large number of signals is indistinguishable from noise

    Many people are sharing the news from Facebook's announcement today that online sharing is growing exponentially. CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that Facebook users now share 4 billion "things" each day, which is double the rate of sharing one year ago, consistent with Zuckerberg's Law of Information Sharing first articulated in 2008. While some seem excited about…

  • Socialbots 2: Artificial Intelligence, Social Intelligence and Twitter

    The students in my artificial intelligence course recently participated in a competition in which they formed 10 teams to design, develop and deploy "social robots" (socialbots) on Twitter [the Twitter profile images for the teams' socialbots are shown on the right]. 500 Twitter accounts were semi-randomly selected as a target user population, and the measurable…

  • Airborne telepresence robots: 1995 & 2011

    In introducing a short Marketplace Tech Report story about a floating blimp telepresence avatar this morning, host John Moe somewhat sarcastically said "Oh, no: not another floating blimp telepresence avatar story!", highlighting the rather unusual nature of a story about a "blimp-based boss". The story, reported by producer Larissa Anderson starting at the 3:08 mark,…