November, 2008

Noticed / Thoughts — 2 Comments
26
Nov 08

StatSheet, The FiveThirtyEight of Hoops

Late November in North Carolina is a very special time of year, as it marks the beginning of a period of deep religious reflection.  That’s right, it’s college basketball season.  For those of you who are fans and/or stats junkies, I wanted to point you towards a great website – StatSheet.com.  StatSheet is the product of (the amazing) Robbie Allen, a friend and fellow collaborator on BarCampRDU and other RDU-area projects.

What is StatSheet?  It’s the FiveThirtyEight.com of College Basketball (as well as the NFL, NBA, and High School Basketball).  The site boasts a terrific, clean interface, with a focus on stats and graphs – for wonks, Bill James-heads, and fantasy fans.  I particularly like the embeddable graphs – check out the GameFlow graph from last night’s UNC-Oregon game:

Robbie’s blogged about his statistical forumla for calling a game over at the StatSheet Changelog.  And for the die-hards, StatSheet also list information about referees.  As noted by Robbie in the disclaimer, “Boxscores list three officials per game. I have no way of associating specific foul calls to specific refs. As a result, I associate the number of fouls called in a game with each ref.”  This presents an interesting statistical problem – could we devise a technique to break down this collective data and provide an estimate prediction of fouls/game?

Since the data is coupled, we could employ analysis of variance to analyze the groups, looking for referrees that significantly vary.  For example, if we have nine referees who rotate through three pairs, we would be able to use analysis of variance to target and identify a referee that consistently delivers more or less fouls than the standard interval (i.e. look for the common outlier).  But what if we wanted a predictive model?  In that case, we might wish to apply a fixed-effects or hierarchical linear model.  Looking at the pseudo-interactions between the groups of referees, we would be able to predict an estimate of fouls/game for the combination.  This would be most interesting to explore from a historical perspective, to identify games with significantly more or less fouls.  Potential interactors in that model would include TV broadcast, team rankings, and Duke status (if the team is Duke, the number of fouls called on Duke is generally two standard deviations below the ref’s mean).

My disclaimer is that I don’t know the first thing about sports stats, so pay no attention to me.  However, I’m loving StatSheet, it has become my go-to stats site (edging out both ESPN and Yahoo Sports), and I thought I’d pass it on to you.

Thoughts — 1 Comment
25
Nov 08

Guest Lectures in Technologies of Friendship

Wayne Sutton, one of my esteemed guest lecturers in last night’s (penultimate) Technologies of Friendship class, streamed and recorded the lectures via Ustream.tv.  If you’d like to check them out, here’s a link – and I’ve embedded the video.

Streaming live video by Ustream

Thank you again to my speakers – Brian, Wayne, Dave and Abe. We had great conversation and I’m pretty sure we could have kept going for a few more hours (which is saying something for being in class on 8:30PM on a Monday). To find out more about the speakers and their projects, check out the following:

Thanks again to my speakers for a great set of talks.

Noticed / Thoughts — 5 Comments
24
Nov 08

Serious Privacy Issues with Google SearchWiki

David Weinberger highlights a stunning oversight by Google’s SearchWiki team (bold mine):

[T]he results page shows you the nicknames of other users who have voted the page up. So, now the whole world will see that “dweinberger” not only searched for “Angelina Jolie” but thumbs-upped the page of closeups of her tattoos? Guess who just changed his nickname to something less identifiable! This is a feature without value — the list of names isn’t clickable or complete or tell you how many people voted it up — unless you recognize someone’s nickname, in which case it has negative value.

In addition, Google has made a curious decision in requiring all SearchWiki “notes” to be public.  That is, if you want to take advantage of SearchWiki and leave yourself a note, all other SearchWiki members will be able to read it.  This is broken on many levels.  Obviously, there are privacy concerns – you may want to leave a note, but do you really want all other Google users to be able to read it?  And beyond privacy, what about utility.  Let’s say you want to leave yourself a note “To get to the policy page, click on About, and then Policies.”  Since you can only place that note publicly, it will quickly get lost in the sea of other Google users notes.

Considering Google’s zero-day rollout of SearchWiki into their main search property, the lack of HCI and Privacy consideration that went into the product is shocking.  There’s no opt-out.  All comments are forced public.  There’s no way to change your handle.  There’s no way to leave yourself a privacy-enhancing private note. Instead of rolling this feature out fully-baked (opt-in/out, with critical functionality), Google has rolled a half-baked product to all users and forced them through this curious funnel.

Last year Starbucks radically changed its business model by returning the company to its roots.  I don’t know how well that effort has worked, but I liked the concept.  Using the economic downturn as an excuse, perhaps its time for Google to do the same?

Hacks — 4 Comments
22
Nov 08

Fixing Google with Adblock Plus

TechCrunch is right – Google, It Wasn’t Broke.  Google has rolled personalization at the item level into search, cluttering their elegant interface.  As far as I can tell, this affects all users who are logged in with a Google account (i.e. Gmail, etc), and there’s no way to opt out.  Now, I’m not against personalization – if you want it.  And while it appears there’s no way to opt out, you can make the cluttering icons disappear with Adblock plus (Firefox users).  To make the buttons and conversation icon disappear, add the following “element hiding rules” to Adblock Plus:

google.com#BUTTON(class=wci)
google.com#BUTTON(class=w10)
google.com#BUTTON(class=w20)

Voila, Google back to normal.

Update: TechCrunch reports that Google may be rolling this feature back, and it reports on a Greasemonkey script that accomplishes the same results as this Adblock Plus filter.  I’m not a Greasemonkey user so I’m not able to verify.

Thoughts — No Comments
20
Nov 08

Reminder: Guest Lectures on Work, Organization and Action

Just a friendly reminder – please RSVP if you get a chance (so I can figure out how many snacks we need), but if you don’t RSVP, please feel free to come anyway!

On November 24, we’ll be discussing new forms of work, organization and action in INLS490.  We’re lucky have four experts coming in to discuss their first-hand experience with the topic.

Our guests for November 24 will be:

All of these guests are leveraging new media and technologies in their work.  Brian’s work with Carrboro Coworking is addressing a very real new-economy need – creating collaborative spaces for creative work.  Dave works virtually and physically with many different teams, and Wayne is the glue of the Triangle-area technology scene.  Abe is venturing out with his first startup, addressing work patterns and productivity.  Clearly, this is going to be a dynamite class.

If you’re in the area and would like to attend, please do – the class is in Manning Hall 307, Mon Nov. 24 from 6-8:30.  One thing I ask – if you’re not affiliated with UNC, please drop me a line and let me know you’re coming.  I’ll provide cookies and snacks.

Noticed — No Comments
20
Nov 08

MacArthur’s Digital Youth Report

Via danah boyd and Mimi Ito, the MacArthur Digital Youth Project has released its findings.  Ito writes:

It’s been over three years in the making, but we are at long last releasing the results of our Digital Youth Project. The goal of this work was to gain an understanding of youth new media practice in the U.S. by engaging in ethnographic research across a diverse range of youth populations, sites, and activities. A collaboration between 28 researchers and research collaborators, this was a large ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of their Digital Media and Learning initiative. I was one of the PIs on the project together with Peter Lyman, Michael Carter, and Barrie Thorne.

Over the past few years, I’ve paid close attention to this project.  I’ve met a few of the PI’s (sadly, never Peter Lyman), I’ve spent time with a number of the researchers, and I’ve always been impressed with (and more than a little jealous of) the work this team has accomplished.  The project produced countless presentations, reports and articles, as well as a book series that I consider foundational.  In my short graduate school career, I’ve looked at this project as a model of successful research.  Much credit also goes to the MacArthur foundation for having the foresight and willingness to endeavor this project; it has had a profound impact on the field.

The New York times writes about the effort:

The study, part of a $50 million project on digital and media learning, used several teams of researchers to interview more than 800 young people and their parents and to observe teenagers online for more than 5,000 hours. Because of the adult sense that socializing on the Internet is a waste of time, the study said, teenagers reported many rules and restrictions on their electronic hanging out, but most found ways to work around such barriers that let them stay in touch with their friends steadily throughout the day.

Of course, the “findings” of this project are interesting (and serve an important role countering popular discourse around young people and technology), but I’m equally interested in the networks this work has created.  The 28 researchers, PI’s, assistants, conferences, meetings, online chats, etc. have bridged the field and brought many to the table.  Perhaps greater than any findings will be the legacy of research and connections it leaves behind.  In the meantime, you can read the final report here.

Teaching — No Comments
14
Nov 08

Invitation: Guest Lectures on Work, Organization and Action

On November 24, we’ll be discussing new forms of work, organization and action in INLS490.  We’re lucky have four experts coming in to discuss their first-hand experience with the topic.

Our guests for November 24 will be:

All of these guests are leveraging new media and technologies in their work.  Brian’s work with Carrboro Coworking is addressing a very real new-economy need – creating collaborative spaces for creative work.  Dave works virtually and physically with many different teams, and Wayne is the glue of the Triangle-area technology scene.  Abe is venturing out with his first startup, addressing work patterns and productivity.  Clearly, this is going to be a dynamite class.

If you’re in the area and would like to attend, please do – the class is in Manning Hall 307, Mon Nov. 24 from 6-8:30.  One thing I ask – if you’re not affiliated with UNC, please drop me a line and let me know you’re coming.  I’ll provide cookies and snacks.

← Older Entries